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Summer is over to the tune of a million mothers collectively sighing.

Not because we didn’t love it. We did.

We loved the long, sun-drunk days. The bare feet and wet towels. The popsicles melting faster than anyone could eat them. We loved watching our children become slightly wilder versions of themselves.

But let’s be real, we also hid from them.

In the blue light of early morning. In attic rooms. In bathrooms with locked doors. Anywhere we could carve out seven uninterrupted minutes to remember that we were people before we became responsible for everyone’s snacks.

Summer with children is a constant current of feeding, cleaning, driving, and hollering between fights that make absolutely no sense, but are also evidence of the artifacts of small people trying to find their way.

My instinct as a mother is to teach my children that we are all trying to find our way. That there is no hierarchy determining whose needs matter first.

That doesn’t mean I believe my children and I are in the same category. I have years of stumbling ahead of them. Countless mistakes that eventually led me to therapy, language, nervous-system regulation, box breathing, and being told to “I need to touch grass.”

I simply want them to understand that everyone has needs- and that learning how to recognize and responsibly meet those needs is part of becoming a person.

The defining battle between my girls this summer was not original, which somehow made it even more upsetting to me.

They fought over clothes.

I am fine with them fighting. In fact, I want them to fight. I want them to learn how to disagree, repair, and survive another person’s anger without disappearing inside it. Maybe this is because I am raising girls?

But snatching clothes from each other and declaring territorial ownership?

It bored me to the teeth.

Girls fighting over clothes is as old as time. It felt too predictable, too lacking in grit. Although this is admittedly a strange criticism from a woman who has built her entire career as a costume designer, using clothes to evoke emotion is at the center of what keeps the lights on.

My children were fighting over the very core of my art.

I found it exhausting.

It usually began with Nico, my youngest, taking something from Nova’s room without asking.

But we all know that asking only lays the groundwork for a sister’s swift and merciless “NO,” so you can understand Nico’s strategy.

Nova would discover the theft, and suddenly it was a holy war over ancient threads. Though, more likely, these threads are filled with the sort of plastics that may actually be contributing to the emotional outburst. But that is another post for another day.

Eventually, I would be summoned by the screaming.

Both girls had valid points. Both girls were also absolutely feral, losing their minds.

Meanwhile, I would be standing between them, mentally running through the endless list of things I still needed to complete for work, the house, dinner, and life itself.

Their voices slowly became Charlie Brown’s teacher.

Wah-wah-wah. She took my shirt. Wah-wah-wah. She never asks. Wah-wah-wah. She always says no.

Then, in perfect unison:

“MOM. ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING?”

And the answer was yes.

But I had been here before. I already knew this was an argument no one would ever win.

Maybe motherhood is partly learning to make peace with that: not every conflict has a clean ending. Not every lesson lands when we deliver it. Sometimes everyone cries, the shirt gets thrown onto the floor, and we try again tomorrow.

Now school has begun.

My girls race into the building that will hold them for the longer stretch of the day, and I return home to a silence so complete it feels foreign.

In this silence, I’ve been thinking about what we can count as our wins.

Because summer can leave mothers with the strange feeling that we somehow didn’t do enough. We didn’t travel enough. We didn’t make enough memories. We lost our patience too often. We worked too much. We bought too many snacks and still never had the right snacks. Did they drink enough water, wear enough sunscreen?

But when I look back, our wins were everywhere.

Running toward the lake, screaming, “Last one in is a rotten egg” and the rotten egg was usually me.

Watching the skies turn pink and naming the animals we saw in the clouds.

Taking them to their first pop show; their screams will live in my bones for eternity.

Big birthdays and small speeches delivered with enormous courage.

New friends. Old friends. The deep and desperate need for community, and the miracle of finding it.

The wins were not in creating a flawless summer. They were in the evidence that we had lived one.

We fought. We repaired. We lost things. We found them in someone else’s bedroom. We ate dinner too late. We did…touch grass. We needed each other, resented each other, and loved each other with the particular ferocity of a family spending far too many consecutive hours together.

And then, somehow, we made it to the end of summer.

The house is quiet now.

The abandoned swimsuits are drying somewhere. The disputed clothing has been returned to its rightful owner, at least temporarily. My children are off finding their way without me for a few hours.

And I am here, finally able to hear myself think.

Along with a million other mothers, exhaling, feeling the same way.

LITTLE GLOW SKINCARE LAUNCHING 2027