A monologue of motherhood.

Maybe this concern sounds trivial, she thought, her mind drifting into its usual monologue. Most stay-at-home mothers slowly develop the habit of talking to themselves—not out of eccentricity, but out of deprivation. Spending long days enclosed within the same four walls, surrounded only by children, the silence of adult absence becomes almost deafening. You start to miss an adult conversation—the give and take of words that aren’t requests, whimpers, or cries. Instead, your day is filled with repeating the names of your children’s toys, or the elaborate titles they’ve bestowed upon inanimate objects—a rock named “this,” a spoon called “that.” You’re expected to remember every detail, every invented story, and heaven forbid you forget, or worse, cut their sandwich into triangles when they wanted squares. Then comes the storm—tears, screams, tiny fists of protest—and you’re left trying to comfort someone who can’t even explain what’s wrong, because they don’t yet have the words.

At first, it’s endearing—the innocence, the imaginative chaos. You laugh, tell your friends how funny it all is, how unpredictable motherhood can be. But when the same routine stretches into years—ten of them, perhaps—with three children in succession, the sweetness begins to fade. What once made your heart melt now tests your patience in quiet, invisible ways. You find yourself narrating your day aloud just to hear a coherent sentence. You start to crave acknowledgment, conversation, even a brief exchange that reminds you you’re an adult with thoughts beyond nap times and snack schedules. It’s not that you love your children any less—it’s that love, when demanded around the clock, without reprieve or recognition, can turn into a kind of exhaustion that seeps into the soul. What the world romanticizes as “a mother’s joy” is, in truth, often a lonely monologue performed in a room with toddlers.

Excerpt from the short story

A RUINED PIECE OF PAPER

Iqra Mangi