We built a weekend out of closeness.
Mattresses on the floor, bodies piled together,
films and chips, laughter and new rides,
games born from imagination rather than screens.
I was there. Fully.
Present in the way people say they want to be.

And still, night comes with tears.
Small bodies afraid of sleeping alone,
wanting more of me—
more time, more touch, more nearness.
They don’t yet know how to hold gratitude.
They only know need.
Give me more.
Your energy. Your essence.

Sometimes I feel like a well
that never runs dry—
even when it does.

Bedtime stretches thin.
Everyone settled, silence almost mine,
and then a voice calls me back.
Is it need, or delay, or fear wearing a clever mask?
I know the answer lives in closeness.
Still I wonder—
how much of myself can I give
before there is nothing left to offer?

I filled cups this weekend.
Including my own.
And yet, doing this alone,
without another presence to steady the room,
the weight can tip me.
I am calmer than I used to be.
More balanced.
But some nights test every edge I’ve grown.

I look at other parents and think:
we do so much.
We create, we listen, we connect.
And the old voice still whispers—
not enough.
I’ve rewritten that story before.
I refuse to live in it again.
So what, then, is true?

The dance repeats.
Upstairs. Downstairs.
A game I see clearly
even as it burns my patience.
I reach for consequences that feel hollow,
for control that never quite lands,
for quiet that stays just out of reach.

Where is the line?
How do I draw it
without becoming cold, distant, mechanical?
I can’t turn myself into stone.
That was never who I was meant to be.

I respect their storms.
Their crying, their anger, their wild emotion.
But rest matters.
Sleep matters.
And if I don’t protect that boundary,
I disappear inside it.

“You’re only living for your children,”
a voice says.
Maybe.
When they are here, how could it be otherwise?
Their rhythms shape the day.
My wants shrink around theirs.
Art galleries, festivals, quiet pleasures—
they belong to another version of time.

And yet, when they are gone,
I ache for the noise.
The mess.
Their voices calling my name.
I want to hold them close
and tell them how proud I am.

It’s a rollercoaster—
love and depletion, devotion and loss of self,
over and over again.

So I ask the question
that keeps returning in the quiet:

When will what I give
be enough?