What I say when my son asks why I am not eating my dinner

My eldest asked me directly what I was doing and I gave a short, honest, boring answer, and it has never come up again.

What I found hardest was the smell of cooking during the first two months. I was making food I could not be in the room with.

Somebody in this circle said that children notice how you talk about food more than what you eat, and I have thought about that constantly since.

I cook one meal and eat a smaller portion of it, and I stopped making myself something separate at about month three because it was unsustainable.

The evening meal was the hard one. Everybody else hungry at six and me not hungry until nine, and it took a year to find a workable shape.

Something practical: I do the cooking earlier and eat later. It costs me nothing and it removed the daily friction entirely.

Something I got right was not changing anything about what my children eat. This is mine and it does not need to become theirs.

My weekends are the difficult ones because the structure is gone, and I have had to build a very loose one deliberately.

Poppy — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What surprised me was how much my patience improved once the tiredness lifted, and how much of parenting is just having enough patience.

Poppy, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The birthday cake question comes up in this circle every few months, and the answer that works for me is to have a piece and say nothing.

I did not tell my family for four months and then told them all at once, and I would do it earlier if I could do it again.

What I got wrong was trying to keep everything exactly as it was during the hardest fortnight. Something had to give and it should not have been me.