I’m 37 years old, a mom of two girls, seven and eight, and if there’s one thing I know with absolute certainty, it’s this: we will never have any regrets about the time my husband and I chose to give our children.
Our life isn’t flashy. It’s full. Full of packed schedules, early mornings, late nights, and calendars that somehow always seem to overlap. But it’s also full of intention. We show up.
Every single sporting event. Every birthday party. School concerts, award assemblies, practices that end just a little too late. We sit in folding chairs, stand along the sidelines, clap loudly, and cheer as it matters, because to them, it does.
We choose presence, even when it would be easier not to.
There are nights when we are completely wiped. The day has taken everything we had. The couch is calling. But instead, we sit down at the table and pull out a board game. We listen to the rules being explained for the hundredth time. We laugh when someone bends them.
We stay in the moment because we know these small moments aren’t small at all.
At bedtime, we linger. We lay next to them, book in hand, reading one more chapter. We talk about their day, their worries, their dreams, the things they don’t always say out loud. Sometimes we say very little. Sometimes we listen a lot. And sometimes, we just lie there together, knowing that one day they won’t ask us to stay.
Do we fall short? Of course we do. There are moments we lose patience. Days when exhaustion wins. Times we wish we had handled something differently. We are human, and parenting is humbling in that way; it constantly reminds you that perfection was never the goal. Presence was.
And presence is something we fight for.
We are not trying to create picture-perfect memories. We are building a foundation. One where our girls know they are seen. Heard. Valued. One where they never have to wonder if they mattered enough for us to show up.
Someday, they’ll be grown. They’ll have lives of their own, responsibilities we can’t yet imagine. And when that day comes, we won’t look back wishing we had spent more time with them, or wondering why we missed so much. We’ll know we did the best we could with the time we were given.
That’s the promise we made to ourselves and to them. So no matter how busy life gets, no matter how tired we feel, no matter how imperfect we are along the way, this is the truth I hold onto.
