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Dear 30s,

I said goodbye to you last week with a lovely surprise 40th birthday party, time with friends and family, lots of sugary treats, sleep-in mornings and spa visits. I said goodbye to a decade I adored, for you were my baby years. My miracle years and I will love you forever. It has been a decade of tired hips, full hands, first steps…a decade of near constant pivoting to changing ages, needs and behaviors all to the chorus of baby monitor sounds. I have spent a decade forgoing personal time and space to be a harbor to three little souls and oh what I wouldn’t do to go back and do it all over again. Dear 30s, together we traveled to 18 countries even with a global pandemic, 2 pregnancies, IVF appointments, prosthetic appointments and tiny baby years. You have given and taken and I have learned to accept it all.

As I reflect on you, sweet 30s, I can also see that you were the hard years…years filled with grief watching my mom struggle and eventually pass away from breast cancer. Years spent traversing the expanse of the United States with a baby strapped to me, willing time to move faster so I could get off the plane. These were my baby years, spent trying to juggle the dynamics of loss and what that does to a family and the guilt we heap on our souls. Aubrey was 7 months old when I lost my mom and oh how I wish Aubrey knew her Nana. And then there’s the aftermath that no one talks about. What happens to a family when the connecting thread unravels? It’s been impossibly hard navigating that uncharted territory. We struggled through almost 10 months of colic with Kai, constant PT appointments to get Cade walking on bilateral prosthetics and then IVF medical appointments to get pregnant with Aubrey. These were years so intense and challenging, I started an IG account and blog trying to will myself on, the intentional act of finding lovely in the hard. We all have hard and with purpose, can all find lovely there too.

A beautiful life has blossomed out of this last decade and with it, the thankfulness of my soul. I have loved you 30s. Loved you in my loneliness, loved you through long nights. Loved you through my griefs. Loved experiencing you with tiny hands grasping mine. I am sad to say goodbye to you. But I am learning to practice what you have taught. To have open hands. To relinquish, release and respond with grace. Because if it were up to me, I’d want to clamp tight and stop here. Yet you whisper to me the lovely up ahead. A little further to go. This earth is not all there is. Stop now and you will miss it. What is life but an unfolding of years that wraps us in adventure, sometimes sadness, buckets of hard and grief but when sought, reveals layers of lovely too profound to put into words? Lovely that weaves together hard and good into a picture that makes all of it somehow worthwhile. You have fostered my faith, brought me peace and steadied my life expectations. In you I have learned to mother, learned how to say goodbye. Learned how to return to honoring my body well. I gave. I stretched, I found peace. And in it all I found my Lord faithful. And though I have questioned the hard, I can see, You are with me. The steadfast love. With me through my friendship-starved years as I longed for fellowship but was tethered to little needs, nap schedules and home. With me through these brilliant, exhausting, exhilarating and worthwhile years. Every tear, every hurdle, every sleepless night. Because somehow out of all that hard, hope won, perseverance blossomed, grace abounded for my shortcomings.

Somehow in all that hard, hope mingled, rooted, and grew into something lovely. New jobs, creative outlets, passions and projects. I have watched this world change. I have seen disasters, catastrophes, the hard of humanity. And have now lived enough to know, that it won’t change. Dear 30s, you have taught me about choice and the power I have in what I chose to dwell on, exist with and allow. You have taught me the power of my own voice, the power of my words, intuition and have developed in me grit to persevere when others misunderstand them. Let them. So I take you boldly with me into my 40s. More confident. More kind. More able. More present. For you have left me with more time in these unfolding of years. Space to be creative, space for friendships, space for growth.

I have cherished you 30s but I walk with joy into my 40s. Thankful for every wrinkle. Thankful for what the years have taught, taken and provided. Here’s to finding lovely in all the little grooves up ahead as we journey on through this life, whether it be but a breath or lengthy in days, full of peace or turbulent like a trouble sea. Dear 40s, help me to find the lovely you hold and the perseverance to weather what you may bring. And when I doubt, remind me of the steadfast love of the Lord and speak to me of grace. Draw to mind all that I have already seen, the griefs and joy and the sweet sweet memories of all those little years that will forever be my golden years.