The first two pancakes
Mum guilt, even when I'm getting it right.
Saturday afternoon. My youngest was practising his guitar and the frustration came up — the way it does at nine, when your fingers won’t do what your head wants them to. I sat next to him. I didn’t tell him to keep going. I didn’t get tight in the shoulders. We waited until the frustration passed and then he tried the chord again.
The thought arrived before I could stop it. I wouldn’t have done this with the older two.
Not as a happy thought. As a charge.
I’d have got tight in the shoulders. I’d have wanted him to push through. I’d have mirrored the frustration back at him without realising I was doing it. I was too anxious, too rigid, too tired, too young. I parented the older two through the version of myself I had access to at the time, and the version of myself I have access to now is better at it. Calmer. Slower. More willing to wait.
The thing the third child gets is a more experienced mother.
Some of the time. Not all of the time. I snapped at him on Wednesday over the shoes. I got tight on Friday about a maths sheet. The third pancake isn’t coming out perfectly either. The pan is hotter. The cook is still me.
This is the part that’s hard to sit with. The older two had less of the experience. The youngest has more of it. The unevenness lives quietly in the background and surfaces at moments like this, on a Saturday afternoon when one child is getting something I didn’t manage to give the other two.
I made my peace with the parenting mistakes some time ago, in the way you make peace with things you can’t undo. The unevenness is harder. It doesn’t behave like a mistake. It behaves like a structural fact.
That evening I watched At Home with the Furys - a guilty pleasure of mine. Paris Fury has seven children (I know, seven!). At some point she said, lightly, that the first two are like the first two pancakes.
She didn’t mean you need to throw them out. She meant the first two come out imperfect because you haven’t worked out the heat yet. The pan is cold. You don’t know how the batter behaves.
I laughed. And then I sat with it for a long time after.
There’s something the line does. It takes the unevenness — which I’d been carrying as failure — and re-describes it as the shape of the thing. Of course the first ones come out different. By the time you get to the third you’ve calibrated. You’re not a better cook by then in any moral sense. You’ve just made enough pancakes.
This is the part that catches me. The conversation I’d been having with myself — that I’d let the older two down, that I should have known then what I know now — was a conversation that assumed I had the choice. As if the more patient version of me had been available to them and I’d withheld her. As if the calmer me had been sitting in a cupboard and I’d simply chosen not to take her out.
She wasn’t in a cupboard. She hadn’t been made yet. The version of me who can wait, who doesn’t tighten at the first sign of difficulty, who’s stopped expecting the day to go to plan — that’s what twenty-six years of doing this has taught me. The teaching was done by the older two. Without them I wouldn’t be this version of myself.
That sits differently from I have done a better job with the third. Of course I’ve done a better job with the third. I’ve been doing the job for 26 years. The question is what I do with the felt residue of not having been this version of me, then, when the older two needed her.
Probably nothing actionable. Probably I sit with it. Probably I let the thought arrive on a Saturday afternoon and notice it and let it move on. The older two don’t need me to perform a formal apology for not having been someone I couldn’t yet have been. The youngest doesn’t need me to perform guilt about being parented by someone with more practice.
What I might do is stop calling it a failure. There’s something to grieve, quietly. But the word failure is the wrong shape. Failure implies a standard I should have met. The standard I’m holding the younger me against is a version of me that came into being later, partly because she was tired enough, by then, to soften. You can’t fail at being a version of yourself you hadn’t yet become.
Which raises the question I’m less willing to ask. Why is the charge so easy to bring? Why do I sit on a Saturday afternoon and find myself, with no effort at all, marshalling evidence against myself?
The standard is always at my shoulder. There’s a mother somewhere I’m supposed to be — always available, always patient, always attuned, never tight in the shoulders. She doesn’t exist and I owe her an explanation anyway. I internalised her so early that I provide the surveillance myself. No one has to tell me I’ve failed. I tell myself.
The comparison to my younger self is one of the cleanest forms of self-punishment available. The younger me can’t answer back. The older me can’t apologise. The case is opened and closed in the same court.
The Paris Fury line works because it doesn’t reassure. It doesn’t say the first two pancakes were fine. It says the first two pancakes were the first two pancakes. The consolation is the demotion of the standard, not the upgrading of the past.
What I keep coming back to is the older two as the ones who made the pan hot. The youngest gets a more experienced mother because of work they did, often unwittingly, sometimes at cost to themselves.
But that’s not the question that arrived on Saturday. The question that arrived on Saturday is why I turned the afternoon — a child working through frustration, a mother sitting next to him — into evidence. Why the case was already being prepared before I’d noticed I was a witness.