This performance text examines complexities of personal and maternal identity in family life. Speaking in first, second, and third person voices, the author offers autoethnographic accounts of the tensions between separateness and connectedness, normative and subjective motherhood, and novice and seasoned perspectives. The piece functions as a text of resistance that pushes against normative expectations about maternal emotion and child-centered maternal dialogue and gives voice to evolutions in mother wit and lifeworlds. (Contains 1 note.)