The End of Spring

Not long ago, my home was on a garden tour.

If you’ve never been part of one, here’s how it goes: you spend weeks — weeks — cleaning and arranging and second-guessing every throw pillow and wondering if your hydrangeas are going to cooperate (mine did, barely). You stress about things you have never once stressed about before, like whether the baseboards in the hallway are visible from the front door. You deep-clean rooms that nobody uses. You stress-bake and then eat the stress-baking and then stress about that.

And then the day comes. And strangers walk through your home. And it is — unexpectedly, surprisingly, completely — wonderful.

People were kind. They were curious. They lingered in doorways and asked questions and looked at things the way you hope people will look at your life — with genuine interest, not judgment. More than one person stopped to thank me for opening my home to them. And I stood there a little caught off guard, because honestly? I was the one who was thankful. Thankful they came. Thankful they cared. Thankful for the reminder that opening your doors — really opening them — invites in something you can’t manufacture. Community. Connection. The feeling of being seen in your own space.

And then it was over.

And I stood in my quiet, beautiful, clean house — the house that had just held all of those people, all of that warmth — and I felt the strangest mix of relief and sadness and pride and emptiness all at once.

And I thought: oh. This is May.

This Is the Only Way I Know How to Describe It

Insane leading up to it. Surprisingly beautiful in the middle. Over before you’re ready. And then you’re standing in the aftermath, a little undone, wondering how you can possibly miss something that also nearly broke you.

That’s the home and garden tour. That’s the end of the school year. That’s Candler’s first baseball season wrapping up — four years old, little uniform, swinging at everything with the kind of full-body confidence the rest of us spend decades trying to get back. I cried at approximately every game. Not because anything dramatic happened. Just because he was out there, being a tiny person doing a thing, and I couldn’t slow it down.

That’s Lily Kate finishing her first lap around high school — freshman year, first volleyball season, all of it — walking out the other side more sure of her laugh and more certain of her people than she walked in.

That’s Bishop, almost done with another year of high school. I watch him move through the world now and I catch myself searching his face for the little boy who used to hold my hand in parking lots. He’s still in there. But he’s further back now, making room for who he’s becoming. And I am so proud I could burst. And I grieve it every single time.

This is May. Insane leading up to it. Beautiful in the middle. Over too fast.

The Whiplash Is Real

Here’s what makes my brain short-circuit: Bishop and Lily Kate are creeping toward the finish line. Graduation is no longer some far-off abstract concept — it is a date on a calendar I can almost see from here. Especially now that I see kids who were in elementary school with them actually graduating. Kids who were their prayer buddies their first year at Catholic school. These kids are almost done with the thing I have been shepherding them through their whole lives.

And at the same time — at the exact same time — Candler, my youngest, hasn’t even walked into a kindergarten classroom yet. His entire educational journey is still ahead of him. Every first day of school photo in front of the door, every teacher, every grade, every moment I think I’ve finally survived — all of it is still coming.

I am simultaneously at the beginning and the end. Dropping one era of motherhood off at the curb while another one is just learning to tie its shoes. Nobody warns you that you can grieve graduations that haven’t happened yet while also buying a first backpack. It is the strangest, most sacred kind of whiplash.

Also: These Kids Are Actively Exhausting Me

Let me be honest for a moment.

I am tired.

The end of the school year is not just emotionally heavy — it is logistically ruthless. It is the permission slips and the last-minute project boards and the “Mom I need poster board TONIGHT” texts at 9pm. It is the field trips and the award days and the spirit weeks and the dress-down-days-but-not-too-casual dress codes that I cannot figure out no matter how many years I try.

It is the collective final-stretch energy that children give off in late April and all of May, which I can only describe as: chaos with good (maybe?) grades.

They are done. They checked out mentally around spring break. But there are still weeks left, still things to do, still routines to hold — and I am the one holding them. Alone in a kitchen at 10pm, trying to find a specific color of tissue paper for a project due tomorrow, eating leftover rice because I forgot to eat dinner, wondering how I am still standing.

So yes. I am happy it’s almost summer. I am genuinely, desperately ready for a different kind of chaos — the kind without alarm clocks. We have our annual beach trip on the horizon and I have been holding onto that image like a life raft: salt water, no schedule, my three kids in the same place at the same time with nowhere to be. My soul is thirsty for it.

What Nobody Talks About: Doing It Alone

Now- here’s the part I sometimes write around and dress up and soften.

I do this alone.

The ceremonies I sit at — I sit at them alone. The proud moment when your kid gets an award and every other parent leans over to squeeze their partner’s hand? I feel that space beside me. I feel it loud.

I am the one who knows the school schedule by heart and carries the sunscreen and texts the other moms when I missed the email about the costume change. I am the one who holds the grief and the joy at the same time with no one to hand either one off to.

And before anyone says it — yes, I have people. I have my mom. I have friends who show up. I have a village and I am grateful for it.

But there is a particular weight that comes with being the only parent in the house. The weight of knowing that if I don’t see it, no one will see it. That if I don’t remember, it won’t be remembered. That the celebrating and the worrying and the logistics and the feelings — all of it runs through me, and only me, and I have to keep running even when I’m empty.

May makes that loneliness louder. Because May is loud with love, and love in a crowd reminds you of who isn’t there.

The home and garden tour, even — all those people filing through, and I was the only one from my family greeting them- with the help of amazing docents! The only one who prepped and stressed and stood at the door. And also the only one who got to feel the full weight of what it meant when they said thank you.
Maybe that’s the thing about doing it alone. You carry it all. The hard parts and the beautiful parts both. Nothing gets split. Nothing gets diluted.
It’s a lot. And it’s also, somehow, entirely yours.

But Here’s What Holding Grits & Grace in the Same Space Has Taught Me

I’m still here.

After every exhausted May. After every last-day drop-off where I cried in the car. After every ceremony I sat through alone with a full heart and a quiet seat beside me. After every summer that scared me and every fall that started fresh.

I am still here.

And so are they — my three, growing like summer weeds, becoming people who will one day tell their own children about the Mays of their childhoods. About their mom who showed up, every single time, even when she was tired. Especially when she was tired.

You don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to be both parents. You just have to be present. You have to sit in the seat, even when it’s lonely. You have to clap the loudest. You have to cry in the car and then go home and pour a glass of sweet tea and let yourself feel all of it — the pride, the grief, the exhaustion, the love that has nowhere to go but everywhere.

Open the doors anyway. Even when you’re terrified. Even when it’s been a long season and you’re not sure you have anything left to offer. Open the doors and let people in.

You might be surprised at how grateful they are. And you might be even more surprised at how grateful you are.

The end of spring breaks me open, every single year.

I am tired. I am proud. I am sad. I am grateful. I am holding all of it in the same two hands I used to buckle car seats and sign permission slips and wipe little faces and deadhead the hydrangeas before strangers came to look at my life.

I would not trade a single May for anything in the world.

Even the exhausting ones.

Especially the exhausting ones.

If this hit close to home, share it with a mama who needs to hear it today. And if you’re in the thick of May — doing it alone or just doing it tired — I see you. You’re doing it. That’s enough.