Seeing Motherhood Clearly

Motherhood is strange. The most ordinary things can split you open.

This week, my 13-year-old got glasses. Glasses and contact lenses.

It should’ve been a simple errand. But when the optometrist handed him the mirror and he looked at himself for the first time in his new frames, I caught something in my chest. A tightening. A recognition.

Because I was 13 when I got contacts, too.

I’d worn glasses since second grade. Big plastic ones that were a light blue gingham print. Very Little House in the Prairie. But at 13, I was finally allowed contacts. My eye doctor and parents both thought I was mature enough for the responsibility. That trust made me feel different, more grown up. Like I crossed an invisible line. Suddenly, I wasn’t just a kid anymore.

And now it’s his turn. Same age. Same shift.

There’s something eerie and tender about watching your child step into a memory you still carry in your own body. I remember the sting of saline solution. The awkward routine of popping lenses in and out with fingers that still felt clumsy. But more than that, I remember what it meant. The becoming. The wanting to be seen differently.

And now I’m seeing him differently.

This tiny moment—barely a blip on the calendar—marks time. Not just his age, but mine. Not just his growth, but the slow, invisible movement away from me. It’s starting, the part I’ve known was coming. The part where he begins to move out of the orbit I’ve held him in for over a decade.

He’s 13. These are the years when space starts forming in places that used to be filled with closeness. When he pulls away to figure out who he is without me hovering too close. When I go from being the center of his world to more of a background figure. Watching. Witnessing. Less guiding, more steadying.

Some days I want to hold on tighter. Other days I feel the pull to let go more gracefully. Most days I’m somewhere in between—just trying to stay present without crowding him. Trying to shift us, gently, from a relationship between a parent and a child to one that will, eventually, be between two adults.

It’s a long transition. And there’s no map for how to do it well.

All I know is this: I want him to trust me. Not because I’m his mother and I said so, but because I’ve earned it. I want him to respect me—not just because I fed him and kept him alive, but because I showed up every day in ways that mattered. I want him to know that as much as I’ve loved him as a child, I’m doing the work to love him as he becomes whoever he’s going to be.

All that—from a pair of glasses.

And he looks so grown in them, it nearly broke me.