When the Season Turns: On Disruption, Growth, and Finding Your People

Something is shifting — and you can feel it.

The evenings are stretching out a little longer now. Light lingers past dinnertime. There's that particular smell in the air after spring rain, like the world is quietly rinsing itself clean after months of grey.

But let's be real: this is not a gentle transition.

One day feels like May. The next throws you back into February. The clocks jump forward and suddenly you're negotiating with a wide-awake five-year-old at what their body is absolutely certain is 7pm. Add spring, March or Easter break, - depending on where you are - and the rhythms your family worked so hard to build? Temporarily out the window.

Spring doesn't arrive gracefully. It arrives in fits and starts, pulling forward and snapping back, full of contradictions. Sound familiar?

Because parenting is a lot like that, too.

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I think about this every time the seasons change. How the developmental leaps my kids went through never arrived on a clean schedule either. Each milestone brought this layered mix of feelings — pride and tenderness and something a little like grief, all at once. Watching them stretch into new versions of themselves was breathtaking. And also, honestly? A little destabilizing.

What caught me off guard wasn't just how much they were growing. It was how much it asked of me.

Parenting doesn't give us control. It gives us proximity to constant change we didn't initiate and can't always predict. We're just here, showing up in real time, trying to meet our kids where they are — which means we have to know where we are first.

The real work, so much of the time, is learning to move through our own emotions so we have something steady to offer theirs.

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This is exactly why community isn't a nice-to-have. It's the thing that makes the rest possible.

For me, 2SLGBTQIA+ parenting meet-up groups were one of the most grounding parts of the journey — not because they hand you a roadmap, but because you're surrounded by people who already get it. No backstory required. No translating your experience so someone else can understand it. Just people a few steps ahead offering steadiness, and people just starting out reminding you how far you've come.

There's something irreplaceable about being witnessed in that way.

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So I'll leave you with a question I keep coming back to this time of year:

What feels like spring to you right now?

For me, it's the first green shoots in the front garden — small and stubborn and completely indifferent to the fact that it snowed last week. A reminder that growth doesn't wait for perfect conditions. It just begins.

Drop your answer in the comments. I really want to know.