The Wilds Project.

Hard to believe there’s only one more cotillion before my tiny baby crosses that middle school finish line, joining her big sister at the high school.

No matter what we do, time is the thief. It never slows, never asks permission. What once felt like a trickle now feels like a current. And if you fight it, you drown.

What hurts most is realizing the milestones of the last ten years now have expiration dates.

Last cotillion.
Last drop off.
Last time their hand reaches for yours.
Last. Last. Last.

No one tells you that part.

They warn you about sleepless nights. About diapers and tantrums and the physical exhaustion of keeping small humans alive. They tell you to soak it in, to cherish it, because it goes fast.

But no one tells you that the real ache comes later.

It’s a constant sea — this feeling of almost drowning in the knowing. The knowing that nothing stays. The knowing that everything beautiful eventually becomes something you remember instead of something you’re living.

I don’t think acceptance is the right word. This ache that lives in my bones doesn’t stop aching with “that’s just life.”

It’s something else.

A submerging.

Somewhere along the way, these little girls I was entrusted to take care of and feed and keep alive stopped being only the ones I was raising and became the ones who were raising me, too.

They are my best friends.

They have witnessed every version of me. Not just the mother. The human. The breaking. The rebuilding. The becoming.

They are woven into every version of who I am. Not separate from me. Not behind me. Beside me.

They are no longer just part of my life.

They are the shape of it.

Motherhood, I’ve realized, is not the act of holding on. It is the act of slowly learning how to stand still while everything you love continues moving forward.

And maybe that’s why change doesn’t feel like growth.

It feels like erosion.

Like having a front row seat to watching the shoreline of your own life slowly give way to water you were never meant to hold back.

I see it in the way they carry themselves now. In their independence. In their opinions. In the quiet ways they no longer need me the same way they once did.

Not gone. Never gone.

Just becoming.

And somehow, in the cruelest and most beautiful way, every season becomes the best season of my life. Not because it hurts less. But because I am here to witness it.

Because every single day with my girls is both the greatest gift I’ve ever been given and the deepest heartache I’ll ever carry — loving them in real time while already feeling the current pulling them toward lives that are fully their own.

The blessing and the curse of mamahood — nothing both fills and grieves your heart all in the same hand.

May these waters take me fully.

May I never learn how to stand safely on the shore.

Because the truth is, I never wanted safety.

I wanted them.

And I got them.