Not long ago, my son Bernard asked me a question that caught me off guard. “What are your hobbies?” I started listing them. Writing. Music. Spending time with friends and family. Travel. He looked at me for a second. “I don’t really see you do those things.” Oof.
He wasn’t trying to make a point. He was simply making an observation. But it stayed with me because he was right. My children see me do a lot of things. They see me making dinner and packing lunches. Driving someone somewhere. Answering emails. Keeping track of appointments and school schedules. Remembering what needs to be signed, bought, washed, returned, scheduled, or brought to school tomorrow. They see me working. They see me mothering. But how often do they see me doing something simply because it matters to me?
Amidst the wild and crazy of day-to-day life, the things I loved didn’t disappear. They just got quieter. Writing became something I squeezed into the spaces around everything else. Music played in the car instead of being created by me. Travel became something planned around school calendars and everyone’s needs. Time with friends required coordination.
None of this happened because anyone asked me to give those things up. Life just got busy. Full. And I love much of what filled it. I love being their mother. I love being the person they come looking for. I love our family traditions, our conversations in the car, the chaos around the dinner table, and even some of the endless logistics that come with raising children. I often nerd out on those.
But Bernard’s comment made me wonder what my children were learning by watching me. I thought especially about my daughter. I don’t want her to grow up believing that becoming a mother means slowly disappearing into everyone else’s needs. I want her to know that she can love people deeply and still make room for herself. And I want my son to know that, too.
There are still interruptions. Someone needs a ride. Someone can’t find something. Dinner isn’t going to make itself. I haven’t discovered some magical formula for balancing ambition and motherhood. I would be rich if I cracked that code. What I am beginning to understand is that making room for myself doesn’t take something away from my children. It may actually give them something.
They get to see a mother who loves them fiercely without making motherhood the only thing that defines her. They get to see that adulthood doesn’t have to mean becoming smaller. And maybe someday, when they think back on the woman who raised them, they’ll remember more than the lunches and rides and appointments.
I hope they’ll remember that I wrote. That I traveled. That I laughed with my friends. That I turned the music up and sang along. That I loved being their mother. And that I still made room for the rest of me.
Elise Ariel Scalise wrote this essay for the October 2026 issue of Mothered Magazine.
