It is past midnight when I hear it. The children are asleep. The chores are done. I have showered, and for the first time all day there is nothing that needs me. This is the hour I wait for. It is also the hour I am too tired to use. I sit in the quiet, fighting sleep, because the quiet is the only thing that is mine and I do not want to give it back yet.
Then a sound from the street. A low, grinding drone, coming closer.
I go to the window of the children’s study room and look down. It is pitch dark, but I can see the snow by the light of the street lamp, coming down hard, slanting through the cone of orange. The city snow plough is working its way up the road. Grinding through the night while the rest of us wind down. Out there in the cold are men making their mark on the day, keeping the city running for the morning, being of use. I stand at the glass and feel the contrast settle somewhere behind my ribs.
This is what the drifting feels like.
I know the work I am doing matters. I am raising my children myself, with my own hands, and I am convinced, most of the time, that there is nothing more worth doing. And still I am sad for what it paused. My own life. The things I used to reach for. The person I was in the middle of becoming before the days filled up with everyone else. Both of these are true at once, and they do not cancel out. I have stopped waiting for one of them to win.
It is not burnout. Not quite. And it is not depression, not in the clinical sense I was trained to recognise. It is something softer and harder to name. A sense of drifting. Of waiting. Of wondering, quietly, when my turn will come.
I think back over the day and I cannot find the part of it that mattered. I fed them. I cleaned up what they left. I woke them, argued with them, chased them back to bed. I wiped one child and worried about another who had not gone at all. The whole day was motion, and none of it was the kind of motion that leaves a mark.
There was a life before this one. I worked in hospitals, in oncology and palliative care. At the end of a long day then, however heavy it had been, I knew what I had done with it. I had sat with someone frightened and made them a little less so. I had taught a wife how to move her husband without hurting either of them. I had held a hand, met a person, changed something that would not have changed if I had not been in the room. I came home tired in a way that felt earned.
Now I wrestle with two small versions of myself. We argue about socks. I measure my usefulness in meals produced and mess removed, in whether the older one has eaten and whether the younger one has been to the toilet. It is love, all of it. It is also the most invisible work I have ever done.
There is grief hidden inside the waiting. That is the part nobody says out loud.
We talk about the exhaustion. The mental load, the relentlessness, the way the days blur into one long day. But the grief, the quiet mourning of a self that has been set down and not picked back up, that one stays tucked away. Too tender to name. Too close to ingratitude to risk saying.
I have sat with this feeling for a long time without knowing what it was. Desires I could not quite reach. A version of myself I could see at the edge of things and never quite get to. And every time I have tried to reach her, I have reached too far. I take something on, on the side, and then I take on too much, and I wear thin. There was a stretch when my body began settling the account for me, fevers arriving the moment I finally stopped, as though they had been waiting for permission. I still do not know what the more is that I keep wanting. I only know the shape of overreaching for it, and I have learnt to be wary of pushing past my own edges again.
And underneath the grief, fear. The fear of wasting something. Of looking back, one day, and finding I was only half-present through a season that deserved all of me. I know that fear from the other side of it. I sat with people at the end of their lives who were doing exactly that: counting the seasons they were sure they had drifted through, the years they thought they had missed. I did not expect to recognise them from inside my own kitchen.
The questions come the way they only come after midnight. Am I meant for this. Just this. Just mediocre, just drifting, just passing through. And then, quieter, the one underneath: would it be all right if I were.
I have learnt that no amount of turning it over in the dark changes the answer, if there is one. So I have stopped trying to solve it and started trying to name it, which is the one thing I know how to do with a feeling. Unnamed things fester. Named things can at least be held. Something shifts, a little, when I say it plainly, even only to the glass. I feel like I am drifting. I feel like I have been paused. It solves nothing. It only stops the feeling from being a secret I keep from myself. It means I am a person and not just a function. That is not selfishness. It is just true.
I am doing what I know is right. It is hard, and it does not feel like enough. There is no perfect version of this, and no clean answer waiting if I only think harder. What the season is asking of me is not a solution but a kind of acceptance. To be more present than I am. More grounded. To be here for it, before I look up and find the children grown and the whole of it drifted through.
The snow is still coming down. The plough has moved on, the street is cleared, and I can see, in the same lamplight, that the snow has piled up over my own driveway. That one is mine. We will clear it in the morning, and it will snow again, and we will clear it again.
Is there meaning in clearing snow. I do not think the snow cares. It is mundane and it is boring and it must be done, and it will undo itself by nightfall and have to be done over. But I am coming to think that meaning is not something the work hands you. It is something you make, and then make again, and keep calibrating as you go. What counts for me may count for no one else. It does not have to be grand, or loud, or seen by anyone from the street. It can be quiet. It can be a cleared path that no one will remember by morning.
There are peaks to a life and there are troughs, and this, I think, is a trough: necessary, low, and long. But I know, in the way I know very few things, that when I am the one looking back, counting my seasons, I will not put this one among the years I missed. I will put it among the years I was here for. The snow is cleared so that life can run. Then it falls again, and in the morning I will be out there with the shovel.
I watch until the grinding is gone. Then I go to bed. Not because I want to. I go because sleep is what lets me stand up and do all of it again, and that is reason enough, even without meaning. Not every part of a life has to mean something. Some of it is just the cycle, turning, and me turning with it.
The mourning of the life you gave up for motherhood is in Both Things Are True. And if the drifting feels connected to something deeper about who you are, When You Start Wondering About Yourself might be worth reading next.
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