Today marks the end of what I will always remember as the Solo Parenting Summer of 2025. In case I haven’t told you in person (which, if I know you, I have because I needed you to understand why I felt and acted like a zombie every time we interacted), this summer was a struggle. It had highs, it had lows and I’ll always look back on it fondly because time apparently provides amnesia that gives past events a certain glow but the general takeaway?

That shit was hard.
How so?
Let’s look:

Sleep: Our little sleeping angel went from snoozing a solid 11 hours through the night to taking 1-2 hours to fall to sleep (for naps and for bedtime) and sleeping fitfully for 9-10 hours. Picture, if you will multiple wakings each night taking anywhere from 5-90 minutes to get back to sleep, after which I would struggle to get back to sleep myself, only to wake a few hours later to do it all over again.

Separation: Our independent toddler who went from walking up to ANYONE and starting a conversation suddenly had super separation anxiety making drop-offs and pick-ups a total nightmare for us both.

Sanity: It turns out that one (at least this particular one) needs more sleep than I was getting (around 6 hours a night) and more alone time other than the 27 minute drive twice daily Monday to Thursday to pick up Ollie that I achieved in order to feel sane. Bedtime battles felt hopeless, weekends felt endless and not because I don’t love the everloving heck out of my kid but because my brain was not even close to firing on all cylinders (and perhaps had lost a few along the bumpy way). I needed space, time, a sacred moment to tend to my base needs. But no matter how I gamed the system (I’d wake up early to journal and “get myself right”, he’d wake up right after me. I’d stay up later to get some alone time, he’d wake up extra early).

The cards just didn’t lay well and it was no one’s fault (although, of course, looking back I see a few areas I could have cut myself some slack and given us all an easier time but that’s useless wishing and wondering about a past past-tense). The Chief and I tried to smooth things as best we could by having as much family time together as possible but journeying 16 hours round-trip to see one another every weekend simply wasn’t possible and then ups and downs of reunions and goodbyes sometimes just made things worse.

Finally, finally, things fell into place and we ended up spending the bulk of the end of summer all together in the home that we built, the first home Ollie ever knew. It was pretty dreamy overall.

As the season came to a close, there was just one last stint of the Solo Parenting Summer of 2025 to get through: 10 days while The Chief finished work and closed down the house for winter. What could go wrong?

Two weeks before we left, Ollie got a lovely little diddy called Hand Foot and Mouth disease (which I’ve always mistakenly called “Hand Foot in Mouth” disease which is even grosser). If you don’t know what it is, just think OWWWW. Blisters across your…you guessed it! Hands, Feet and in your Mouth! Plus, bonus if you get them alllllllll over your body. High fever? Check! Pain? You got it! It looks miserable and we all felt terrible that week but undoubtedly, Ollie felt worse. So, needless to say, it was a bit of a messy week with me trying to work while feeling ill myself and simultaneously caring for sweet sick Ollie.

But…

We made it through.

The next week, we narrowly dodged another sickness. I kept repeating to myself “Just stay healthy so you can have all your capacity for this last stretch of solo parenting” and we did…

Until we got to Anchorage.

Within an hour I was sneezing uncontrollably, my eyes were watering, I was coughing and wheezing. It was dope. My allergies were on fire and my meds simply couldn’t stand up to whatever new pollens I was experiencing. Still, Ollie was fine so we were only 50% down. I’d take it. He started a new school the following Monday and…

jumped right in! No separation anxiety, just pure joy AND he had slept pretty well the night before. Things were looking up.

Apparently, opposites attract because up was swiftly followed by down. By Wednesday, Ollie’s school was closed due to a…you guessed it! Hand Foot and Mouth outbreak. No, Ollie was not the Patient Zero,it had arrived before him but since he’d just had it, his doctor figured it was highly unlikely he’d contract it again.

Highly
unlikely.

We waited.
Nothing.
The weekend came and with it, nothing.
We’d avoided it!

Saturday night, after a night of pampering myself to congratulate me on not losing my shit through another week of being sick, having my kiddo home from school and just generally trying to piece together life, I went down to the laundry room to flip the clothes and found…

A shitstorm.

The floor was flooded with water but not just any water, it was…sewage!
By 11:30 pm, the floors were mopped to the best of my ability and I was finally in bed. Then started the wakeups. Two that night with the final one being before 6 am. I was EXHAUSTED and Ollie was…sick. “Mama, my mouth hurts.”

Fack!

I spent the morning checking to see where the backup was happening and figured it out by flooding the room twice more (call me an overachiever). After every single towel in our house that I was willing to sacrifice was used and I’d called every plumber open on the weekends (none of whom were apparently open on the weekends or whose service lines simply hung up on me), I gave up and gave in. Things were as tidy as could be for now and so…

We went to find mushrooms.

Did we find any?
Nope (not that were still edible).
Did we stay at home and stew?
Nope.
Was Ollie a total trooper?
Yep.

This morning, I finally got ahold of a plumber. Ollie busied himself while I went to my necessary work meetings and talked with the plumber and…things came together. The clog was fixed. We had water again.

As I drove my little dude for a nap along the Turnagain Arm, I took in the views and listened to a podcast with Esther Perel (loooooooove her!) to calm my mind. I was still completely exhausted and in need of a break, overstimulated and under-nourished but I hadn’t “lost it”. I’d been frustrated, sure, but something felt different in the way I was reacting to the shitstorm. Then the podcast talked about something I’d never thought about. It talked about how we can come through trauma alive or we can come through trauma living. It struck me. I’m not comparing a plumbing problem to trauma, but I have definitely lived through my fair share of true trauma and it left me questioning: was I alive or just living? The shitstorm was small potatoes but it had to start somewhere. Instead of lingering in the hard, I could relish the good on the other side. I could dance through the shitstorm, smile as I came out better and be grateful every time I used the washing machine and didn’t find our floor flooded.

The Solo Parenting Summer of 2025 was good overall, it’s not just the amnesia of passing time. Yes, it was hard. It was trying but I also got to spend the most time I have with our nugget since he was still in diapers and that was beautiful. And yes, I did learn things I don’t like about myself (patience when overstimulated? NOT my strong suit) but I also learned new ways to deal with these things and today I think was the biggest learning:

Come alive in the hard, don’t just live.

Thank you to everyone who listened to me complain this summer and thank you, to The Chief for coming home. This concludes the Solo Parenting Summer of 2025.

With love,

from Alaska

P.S. I write this to you as The Chief puts sweet Ollie to bed and a little afterwards which is why you’ll see few pictures and probably a lot of typos in an effort to balance my need for writing with my need for cuddles. Thank you for reading.