the journey to hiraeth

I thought this summer would taste like peaches and saltwater.

I imagined my boys running barefoot through grass still damp from the morning, sticky popsicle hands clutching mine as we hopped from one adventure to the next. We’d have a bucket list to guide us—parks to explore, beaches to visit, trails to wander—until the days blurred into one long memory of sunlight.

But seasons have a way of humbling us.

We got sick before summer even had the chance to start. Not the quick, two-day kind of sick—no, the kind that drifts from person to person until everyone’s run down. My two-year-old’s cough turned into his first hospital stay. What doctors think might be asthma kept him hooked to wires and monitors, my heart tethered right along with him.

When he finally came home, his baby brother’s fever spiked. My days became a blur of measuring medicine, wiping foreheads, and balancing one child healing on meds while the other clung to me with heavy, tired eyes.

Our much-anticipated trip—already paid for—was just days away, and I was sure we’d have to cancel. But in what felt like a small miracle, everyone turned a corner just in time. We went. And it was beautiful. Messy, loud, chaotic… but beautiful. The kind of beautiful that comes with a side of exhaustion so deep, I needed a week to recover once we got home.

Then came my knee injury—what I’m almost certain was a meniscus tear—followed by another stretch of days where adventures were replaced with ice packs and limping around the house.

And now, here we are. It’s August. The heat is still thick in the air, but I can’t shake the feeling that summer has somehow slipped through my fingers. I keep thinking about the things we didn’t do, the list that never got checked off.

Some days, it feels like failure.

But then I remember—life happened. Illness happened. Healing happened. And my children aren’t in school yet. Summer isn’t on a strict timeline in our home. It can be summer as long as the mornings are slow and the afternoons stretch warm and golden.

This wasn’t the summer I pictured.

It was harder, slower, and more unpredictable than I planned.

But maybe, years from now, my boys won’t remember the missed bucket list. Maybe they’ll remember the feel of my arms around them when they were sick, the camping trip we pulled off against the odds, the little moments that didn’t make my list but somehow still made our summer.

Because maybe the magic of childhood isn’t in how perfectly we plan it… but in how we love them through it.

And one day, I’ll miss even this—the summer that didn’t go as planned, but was ours all the same.