08/24/2026
My daughter got married on Saturday!✨
Dylan walked down the aisle on the same property she grew up on, the one her dad has been clearing and beautifully landscaping so it could hold her wedding day. Kevin(her dad) and my dad(her poppy) built her a dance floor from scratch. She and her sister, Edie, painted it themselves, polka dots. So beautiful! Three generations of hands on one dance floor, sitting right there overlooking the prairie she's looked out at her whole life.
I cried happy tears the entire day. Watched my son tear up, over and over. Watched her sister serve her all day with so much joy. Listened to speeches that had all of us laughing and crying in the same breath. Watched my husband marry my daughter to a man I could not be more grateful to call family.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that motherhood has an end date. Eighteen. Moving out. Watching them get married and start a home of their own.
I am still her mother. I will be her mother when she has babies of her own. Mothering doesn't close up shop when they leave the house. It just changes shape.
Motherhood is the most creative work I will ever do. All those ordinary years underneath the highlight reel days, quietly raising a soul that will go on shaping other souls long after I'm gone. That's legacy. The kind that keeps moving forward, generation to generation.
And here's what I've learned in the changing. My kids aren't just something I raise. They're something God uses to raise me. Every year I mother them with intention, I become someone I wasn't the year before. Closer to who He made me to be. Closer to Him.
If you're deep in the newborn years right now, wondering if you'll ever feel like yourself again, you are becoming someone through this. If you're further down the road, watching your own kids build their own lives, you know the mothering is not over. It was never going to be.
Wherever you are in your own season of mothering today, bless you. The hard parts are often the parts quietly making you into someone new.
🤍 I cannot wait to share pictures with you all! (Respectfully allowing Dylee to share first)