Halfway Through The Last Summer
On the messy beautiful imperfect gift of right now
We are halfway through the summer.
And I need to tell you something I have been sitting with for the past few days — something that settled into my chest quietly and has not left.
This is most likely the last summer both of my kids will be home at the same time.
And I am not okay with that.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that requires intervention or a pep talk or someone reminding me that this is what we raised them for.
I know it is what we raised them for.
I am still not okay with it.
And I think that is allowed.
The Summer I Imagined
Let me tell you about the summer I had in my head.
It involved all of us. Lazy mornings with coffee going around the table. Maybe a beach weekend or two — sand between our toes, nobody anywhere to be. Evenings around a firepit with s’mores getting made badly and eaten immediately. Road trips with the windows down and everyone choosing the music. Dinners that lasted longer than they needed to because nobody wanted to be the first one to get up.
The kind of summer that lives in an Instagram grid. Golden hour light. Laughter frozen in a photograph.
That summer exists somewhere.
It did not arrive at my house.
The Summer That Actually Showed Up
What actually showed up was this.
Sickness — the kind that does not care that it is July and everyone has plans. Doctor visits. The particular anxiety of watching your kids navigate their own health and realizing with a start that they are adults now and the decisions are theirs even when every instinct in you wants to take over and fix it.
Work demands that do not pause for summer. Deadlines that do not care about the season. The particular grind of adulting in full view — both of them navigating professional responsibilities with a seriousness that surprised me and made me quietly proud.
A car breakdown at the worst possible moment. Because of course. Because that is when cars break down — at the worst possible moment, when everyone is already stretched thin and the last thing anyone needed was another thing.
An air conditioner that chose a heat wave to stop functioning. Several days of all of us wilting in the heat, a little irritable, a little sweaty, managing with fans and ice water and the dark humor that families develop when things go sideways together.
This is the summer that showed up.
Messy. Unpredictable. Exhausting in the specific way that real life is exhausting — not dramatically, just persistently.
And I would not trade a single day of it.
What the Mess Actually Showed Me
Here is what I have been thinking about as we cross the halfway point.
I have watched my kids this summer in a way I have not been able to watch them before.
Not as the mom managing their lives. Not as the one running interference and solving problems before they fully land. But as a witness — close enough to be present, far enough back to really see.
And what I have seen has taken my breath away.
I have watched them handle things.
Real things. Hard things. The kind of things that used to require my intervention and now — because they are who they are, because of everything these last few years have built in them — they handle themselves.
The doctor visit navigated. The work deadlines met. The car situation managed with a practicality that would have been beyond them three years ago.
They are not the kids I dropped off at college.
They are something more.
And watching them become that something more — right here, in my own house, in the middle of a summer that looked nothing like what I planned — has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
What Our Little Family of Three Has Survived
I want to say something about us.
Our family — this little three-person unit that has navigated more in the last few years than most families navigate in a decade.
Divorce. The unraveling of a life we all knew. A new home. New rhythms. New everything — built from scratch, one ordinary day at a time, by three people who loved each other enough to keep showing up through all of it.
My son’s senior year navigated in the middle of enormous change. Then his leaving. Then my daughter’s senior year. Then her leaving. Then the empty nest arriving like a wave I thought I was ready for and absolutely was not.
And now this summer.
The car and the air conditioning and the sickness and the heartbreak and the work and the heat.
All of it.
Together.
Our little family of three — imperfect, resilient, deeply devoted to each other — moving through it the way we have always moved through everything.
One foot in front of the other.
With love.
With humor when we can find it.
With the quiet understanding that the only way out of hard things is through them.
And we have been going through hard things for years now.
We are still here.
Still us.
Still choosing each other.
I am so proud of us it almost hurts.
The Truth About Being Happy Anyway
Here is something I want to say clearly because I think it matters.
In the middle of all of this — the messy summer, the broken air conditioning, the things that went sideways, the plans that did not materialize — I have been happy.
Not performatively. Not because I am pretending the hard parts are not hard.
But genuinely, deeply, at my core — happy.
Happy in the way that does not depend on everything going right.
Happy in the way that has been slowly, quietly, stubbornly building itself inside me through all the hard seasons — through the divorce and the starting over and the empty nest and the rebuilding — until it became something I carry with me rather than something I find only when circumstances cooperate.
That kind of happiness is different from the kind I used to reach for.
The old kind required the right conditions. The beach day. The firepit. The golden hour photograph.
This kind does not require anything except being awake to what is actually here.
And what is actually here — despite everything — is extraordinary.
My kids. In my house. Right now. This summer.
The laughter that still breaks out at the dinner table even when everyone is tired. The way they talk to each other — these two people I made — with a familiarity and affection that tells me everything I need to know about the family we built. The small moments. My daughter’s voice coming from the other room. My son’s laugh — the one that sounds like he is surprised by it, the one that sounds like his laugh and no one else’s.
These things.
Right now.
Are everything.
The Second Half
We are halfway through.
Which means we have exactly as much left as we have used.
And I am making a decision today — standing here at the midpoint of the last summer we are all together — to use the second half differently.
Not better. Not more. Not more Instagrammable or more planned or more anything.
Just more awake to it.
More deliberate about the joy.
More willing to manufacture a little levity on the days when levity does not arrive on its own.
Because here is what I know about savoring the moment — it does not happen accidentally. You have to choose it. You have to decide that this ordinary Thursday is worth being present for. That the takeout dinner on paper plates because nobody felt like cooking is still a dinner together. That the thirty minutes on the couch watching something nobody particularly wanted to watch is still thirty minutes of being in the same room.
That all of it counts.
What the Second Half Looks Like
I have a few ideas.
Nothing elaborate. Nothing that requires planning or a budget or anyone being in a particularly good mood.
Just small deliberate joyful things.
A movie night with actual effort — the good blankets pulled out, the real popcorn made on the stove the way we used to, everyone’s requests honored, phones put away for two hours. Not because it is a special occasion. Because it is Thursday and we are here and Thursday is enough.
A dinner where everyone picks one thing — one dish, one memory, one song for the playlist. A dinner that takes longer than it needs to because we let it. Because the table is where we have always done our best talking and we do not have enough nights left at this table to rush through any of them.
A spontaneous yes — to the thing nobody planned. The ice cream run at nine o’clock. The drive to nowhere in particular. A day at the beach. The stupid game nobody remembered we owned until someone found it in the back of the closet. The unscheduled afternoon that turns into the thing everyone remembers.
A proper send-off — when the time comes. Not a sad one. A celebratory one. A dinner that honors who they are and where they are going and what this summer was — really was, mess and all — and what it meant to all of us.
The idyllic summer did not show up.
But the real one is here.
And real is better.
For Every Empty Nester Mom at the Midpoint
If you are halfway through your own version of this summer — if it looked nothing like what you planned and everything like what real life actually is — I want you to know something.
The messy summer counts.
The sick days and the broken things and the hard conversations and the plans that fell through — they count. They are not the absence of a good summer. They are the presence of a real one. The kind where people show you who they actually are. The kind where you find out what you are all made of. The kind that does not make for a pretty Instagram grid but makes for the stories you tell for the rest of your lives.
Remember that summer the air conditioning died during the heat wave?
Remember when everything went wrong at once and we just kept going?
Remember how we laughed anyway?
You are going to remember.
And what you are going to remember is not the long beach vacation that did not happen.
It is this.
The realness of it.
The love inside the mess of it.
The three of you — or however many of you — moving through it together the way you always have.
One foot in front of the other.
With love.
The second half is yours.
Make it count.
Not perfectly.
Just fully.
With so much love from the halfway point,
Bridget
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