This.

I’ll never grow tired of looking at this pic of my grown boys embracing their little sister with bear hugs after her college graduation.

As a mom, this show of playful love and affection between siblings is everything. They snuck up behind her, catching her off guard and almost knocked her to the ground as I smiled with an inner giddiness only another mother can understand. Sibling love is profound. Observing such love as a mom is a life-giving reward.

My daughter was the last of three to walk across the stage into full-blown independence. Now I sit here in a drunk-on-love stupor wondering how we got here. It will take me quite some time to unpack my feelings surrounding this new reality.

A lot of things came to an end yesterday. Too many lasts to count. But now countless new beginnings await as the hubs and I watch their young adult lives unfold.

For as much as we struggle as moms with the exhaustion of raising littles, the stress of managing the middle school years, and the angst of tiptoeing through teenagehood, watching our kids evolve and blossom into the young men and women God destined them to be is otherworldly.

Seeing them love on one another is a cosmic kind of healing that helps all the hard parts of parenting slowly fade.

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