MothHERload: What the First Day of School Photo Doesn't Show

Aubrie turned four this summer, and this month she starts a new classroom.

I already know how the morning goes because I've pictured it a hundred times.

I'll take the photo.

Backpack too big for her shoulders, hair done just how she likes it, that grin she gives when she knows something big is happening.

I'll post it.

Somebody kind will comment that time flies, and they'll be right, and it'll still catch me off guard how much that stings and glows at the same time.

What the photo won't show is the twenty minutes before it.

Her not wanting the outfit we picked out together the night before, so lovingly, and me finding six minutes I didn't have to fix it gently instead of rushing her.

It won't show me doing quiet math in the car about whether I have enough softness left in me this week for a rough drop-off, if she has one.

It won't show that I'm genuinely, fully excited for her to have a world of her own now, and that the excitement doesn't erase the small ache of not standing inside every hour of it with her.

Nobody tells you that both of those feelings are allowed to sit in the same morning.

That you can be proud and a little heartbroken and neither one has to apologize for the other.

If you're a mother reading this while you dig through a backpack too big for small shoulders, or while you sit in your own car doing your own quiet math, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not doing it wrong because it isn't simple.

It was never going to be simple.

Watching them grow into more of their own life is supposed to feel like this, full and tender and a little bit like letting go.

The photo isn't a lie.

She really is that excited.

I really am that proud.

It's just not the whole morning, and it was never meant to be.

So this year I'm still taking the picture, because I want to remember her exactly like that.

But I'm also going to say the rest of it out loud, to the people close enough to hold it with me.

That new seasons for our kids are quiet endings for something in us too.

That the love and the letting go arrive together, and both of them are true.

Be gentle with yourself this month.

You're allowed to cry a little in the parking lot.

You're allowed to be proud in the very same breath.

That's not a contradiction.

That's just what loving them well looks like.