There is a moment, sometime in the early years, when you stop hearing your actual name.

It happens so gradually you do not notice while it is happening. One day you are someone with a name people use in conversation, in emails, scrawled on birthday cards, murmured into your ear in the dark. The next, or what feels like the next although it is months compressed, you are Mum. Or Dad. Or some mangled toddler approximation of either that becomes the soundtrack to your days and the last word you hear before sleep.

You begin to answer to it without thinking. You turn your head at playgrounds when any child, anywhere, shouts the word, a Pavlovian response that makes you half-raise your hand before realising the child is not yours. Your partner calls you by it, even when the children are not in the room, even on the rare evening when the house is quiet and you are, in theory, something else to each other. Your own parents call you by it too, as if you have been reclassified in the family taxonomy and a new label issued.

Somewhere inside all that answering, you forget what it was like to be called by the name you carried for decades before this.

It is not that you mind, exactly. There is something large and true in being needed so completely that your identity reshapes itself around the need. To be the answer to another person's every question. The destination of every cry in the night. The first face they learn to focus on and the last person they look for when the world gets large. It is a form of surrender that nothing else in adult life really prepares you for, and there is genuine grace in it.

It is also a kind of erasure, and the erasure is not talked about often because saying it out loud sounds ungrateful.

You catch yourself sometimes, filling out a form at the doctor's surgery, and your own name looks foreign on the page. A word you have read too many times until it loses meaning. You remember being this person, vaguely. The one who existed before anyone else's needs became the architecture of your days. The one who had thoughts that were not interrupted by a cry from the next room. The one who made decisions based on preference rather than logistics. The one who, in some distant century, considered a Tuesday evening her own.

That person seems very far away. Some nights you are not sure she was real.

The strange thing is how complete the transformation feels. It is not only that you are called something different. It is that you have become something different. Your body is different, marked by pregnancy or by sleeplessness or by both. Your time is different, measured not in hours but in nap windows and school runs and the shrinking gap between now and the next thing that requires you. Your conversation is different, punctuated by references to immunisation dates and whether we have tried cutting out dairy. Even your dreams are different. When you sleep deeply enough to dream at all, you dream about them. Lost in supermarkets. Falling from a height you cannot reach. Or, worse, you dream that they are grown and gone, and you wake with your heart racing, needing to check that they are still small and still here and still yours.

Your friends without children do not quite understand the disappearance. They still use your name. They still expect the person who used to meet them for drinks on a Tuesday, take the weekend away, stay up until two arguing about a film. They do not mean to make you feel the gap between who you were and who you are, but you feel it anyway, and the feeling is made worse by the fact that you cannot explain it without sounding as though you are complaining about a life you chose.

Your friends with children understand too well. You have whole conversations in which you refer to each other only by your children's mothers or fathers. How are you, someone asks, and you answer with how they are. Their latest triumph. Their latest worry. Their school. Their sleep. Always them. Rarely quite you.

Sometimes, late at night, when the house is finally quiet and the tea in your hand has gone cold without you noticing, you try to remember. Not just your name, but the person who lived inside it. What you wanted before you wanted this. What you thought about when your mind belonged to you. What made you laugh before laughter became a bargain you struck with exhaustion.

The memories are there, but they feel like photographs from somebody else's life. You recognise yourself in them without quite being able to reach the feeling of having been her. It is not regret. It is closer to a gentle bewilderment. Did I really read the paper in cafes. Did I really care that much about the next promotion. Did I really think I understood love before this.

One day, people say, they will stop needing you in quite this way. They will have their own names to answer to. The house will go quiet in a different way. Your time will return to you like a strange inheritance you had forgotten was coming. And you wonder, in these late-night moments, whether the woman whose name you have lost still exists to be reclaimed, or whether she has become someone new entirely, someone who carries both names at once. Not the person you were. Not only the parent you became. Something more complicated. Something that will also, in time, learn to answer to itself again.

For now, though, you are here. In the thick of it. Answering to Mum. To Dad. To the small voice calling from the other room, needing you again.

Your name can wait. It is still yours.