A Letter On Loving Through the Small Years
My Dearest Friend,
There is a specific weight to the small years that is hard to explain unless you are living inside them. It is not the tired of a long day or a busy season—it is the tired that settles into your bones and stays. The kind built from interrupted sleep, sticky hands, endless questions, and the quiet weight of shaping a tiny human into someone who will one day walk out into the world on their own.
The Trenches of the Small Years
If you are here, you are likely in it—the days that blur together, the nights that stretch longer than you thought you could endure. In the phase where love looks less like joy and more like showing up again—making another meal, wiping another face, answering the same question one more time with patience you are certain you have already used up.
These are the years where parenthood is not tidy or performative; it is feral and tender and exhausting all at once. Where illness cycles through your house like clockwork, where your body feels borrowed and depleted, and where you are asked to give more of yourself than you are certain you have left.
And still—you do.
I know this because I am here too—and because I am still learning it as I go. I am writing from a house where sleep is interrupted, where one child is growing fast enough to surprise me and another still needs me in ways that leave little room for rest. There are days I move through on muscle memory alone, counting hours instead of moments, wondering how love can feel this heavy and still be love at all.
I recognize it most clearly in the moments that don’t look like much from the outside: when a toddler, still learning how language works, finds the words to say I love you at the exact moment the last nerve frays. In the choice to keep talking around the dinner table even when anger or weariness would make silence easier, because connection matters more than perfection. In the laughter that slips out unexpectedly, catching you off guard in the middle of exhaustion.
This is love in the small years: not grand gestures, but repetition. Not ease, but endurance.
Love, Redefined
There is a quiet shift that happens somewhere inside these years. Love stops looking like what you imagined it would be and becomes something more grounded, more demanding.
I had to learn this slowly. In moments when I was exhausted enough to want an answer, a fix, a finish line—and found instead that what was being asked of me was patience. Again. Gentleness I had to choose on purpose. The kind of love that does not sparkle or announce itself, but keeps going anyway.
Love becomes kindness—plain, steady, and often uncelebrated.
Kindness toward your children when they are unregulated, loud, or unkind in return—because they are still learning how to be human, and most adults haven’t mastered that either. Kindness toward yourself when you realize that you can both dislike this season and still be a good parent inside it. Kindness toward your partner when you are tired, distant, or stuck in the roommate phase—not because it feels romantic, but because choosing each other still matters.
Love, here, is often a choice. A small, steady one. A decision to meet one another where you are, rather than where you wish you could be.
Holding the Contradictions
You may hate parts of this life and miss them later. You may be desperate for a phase to end and feel the ache of its passing once it does. Both can be true.
Missing something does not mean you failed to appreciate it while you had it. Struggling now does not mean you will regret these years forever. And loving your children fiercely does not require you to love every moment of raising them.
There is no single right way to survive the small years intact—no map, no formula—as a parent, as a partner, as a person. There is only the way you are doing it: imperfectly, faithfully, day by day.
The Lesson
Love in the small years is not measured by how much you enjoy them.
It is measured by how often you choose kindness when you are tired. By the grace you extend to yourself when this season feels harder than you expected. By the way you keep showing up—again and again—without demanding that the moment be meaningful in order for it to matter.
You are allowed to struggle here. You are allowed to miss parts of this later without romanticizing them now. And you are allowed to decide that love, for this season, looks like caretaking, patience, and staying.
That is still love. It is enough.
To the Spouse Learning to Love Through It
If you are in the trenches right now—tired, touched-out, unsure why this feels harder than you expected—please pause here and hear this:
You are not broken for finding this difficult.
You are not failing because you have to work at loving these years.
And you are not alone in choosing kindness again tomorrow, even when today took everything you had.
Loving through the small years is not about cherishing every moment. It is about staying. About tending what has been entrusted to you. About offering grace—to your children, your partner, and yourself—until the season shifts, as it inevitably will.
