I took this picture some years ago. To me, it has always captured what motherhood is all about. I sometimes post it on this day. It honors so much of what is good, what is real.
A field on an island in Maine. Summer. Two small children bent toward the earth, learning to find blueberries. A woman crouched between them — not watching, not directing — just there, moving through the same task, inhabiting the same unhurried world. Teaching them, without a word, how to be still. How to pay attention. How to find what a beautiful place has to offer if you move through it slowly.
This is how love looks while it’s happening.
Love accumulates quietly over time. In a thousand small moments of presence — showing up, bending down, paying attention — something is built in a child that no school teaches and no résumé ever captures. A sense that the world is safe enough to explore. That there are beautiful things there to find. That they are steady enough to go out into it. And that someone who loves them will be there.
Molly was that for Brett and Larsen. The confidence they carry, the kindness, the groundedness people feel in them — it didn’t come from nowhere. It came from her. From years of showing up fully, without needing to be seen.
This Sunday, we celebrate mothers. I think we sometimes underestimate what we’re celebrating.
We talk about changing the world as if it happens in boardrooms and on battlefields. Sometimes it does. But the most consequential work happens in fields and kitchens and car rides and bedside conversations. The world is changed one child at a time.
It is the most important work there is.
To every mother doing it — the seen and unseen, the celebrated and quietly exhausted — thank you. You are building something that outlasts all of us.
— Pete
Notes arrive on Sundays and some Wednesdays
•
If these shorter notes resonate, The Practice is where I go deeper — longer essays on the same terrain. → here
About me, and Practice Notes → here
About Integrative Coaching → here
About my book, The Why of Sports → here
