When you become a mom, you become a heart donor. From that moment on, a piece of your heart goes walking around outside your body.

It’s not that other things and people—a spouse, jobs, friends, callings, passions, goals and dreams—don’t have your heart, too. It’s just that your children have written their names on pieces of your heart in indelible love.

Because of this, part of a mom’s heart is always where her children are.

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When my children were little, my heart was often in my arms or on my lap or wrapped around my legs while I was trying to make dinner.

Then it was at a school desk or on a bus or at a friend’s house for a playdate or a sleepover.

Now that my children are a teen and a young adult, my heart is, at various times, in a high school classroom or walking across a university campus or in a dorm room. It’s often in a car, on a road I pray is safe.

At other times, my heart is in a school gymnasium or at a dance studio or at a significant other’s house. A few days ago, one piece of my heart was in a 1st/2nd split-grade elementary classroom where my college student—an education major—was a substitute teacher. In a few months, it will be in Ecuador, where she’ll be doing cross-cultural study. Where it will be after she graduates is still entirely unknown, which my heart finds a little unsettling but also exciting, on her behalf.

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Sometimes—the best times—all of my heart is in my living room.