Tamara comes downstairs for breakfast. The whirr of my green smoothie in the blender makes it hard for me to hear her.

“Are my pancakes ready?” she asks/yells.

“In a minute, sweetheart,” I answer/yell back.

In two minutes, a neat stack of whole wheat pancakes dripping with honey and butter are piled in front of her.

My married daughter Shaina walks in. “Breakfast didn’t look like this when I was growing up,” she says, shaking her head. “We were lucky if you were downstairs in the kitchen when we were leaving for school, not upstairs with a baby.”

Shaina may be smiling but I’ve been officially triggered. She’s right — breakfast most certainly did not look like this when she was growing up. Not that I don’t scold Tamara to put her shoes where they belong the night before so we don’t have the last-minute scramble in the morning. Not that Tamara never misses the bus. She actually misses it more than the other kids since her mother doesn’t have two babies in the house to shlep along.

But I am much more present, physically and emotionally these days. As she pours more honey on her pancakes, Tamara chatters to me about the school concert that is only two weeks away and they just started practicing now. Did Shaina have a concert? If she did, and I assume she did, I certainly don’t remember discussing a thing about it — certainly not over breakfast!

In those days, breakfast went more like this: “Baruch, I am not signing your homework. I’ve told you a hundred times, I will only sign homework the night before. I cannot be busy with… okay, just this one more time, but remember this is the last time!” “I don’t know where your knapsack is, Mindy — if it was in your room like it’s supposed to be, you wouldn’t be asking me this question.” “Yes, I hear the baby crying, Leah, thank you very much, but Meyer will miss his bus if he doesn’t leave this second.” “Don’t forget your snack, Meyer!” and I threw it out after him as he ran, jacket half on, to catch his bus.

And don’t forget the early morning squabbling that I actually have begun to forget (joy!) “Moooommy,” Leah would whine, “Shaina took my pen, the one you brought me from Israel.”

“No,” Shaina would reply, “this is my pen, the one Mommy brought me from Israel.”

Would you believe, at that tense moment, I had to go over and see if I could identify the scratches on the top of the pen — which meant it belonged to Shaina — versus scratches toward the bottom of the pen — which meant it was Leah’s — meanwhile berating myself the whole time for not getting two different colors so we wouldn’t have these identification issues in the first place.

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 598)