I was running on five hours of sleep.

The kind where your eyes burn a little and everything feels just slightly too loud.
The kind where even small things feel like too much.

I had taught all day, my students were wild. Then, came home and immediately went into mom-mode.

And then—of course—monsters.

Not metaphorical ones.
The very real, very urgent, something is in my room and I cannot sleep kind.

There was a version of this night that could have gone differently.
Short answers. Frustration.
“Go to bed. You’re fine.”

I’ve done that version before.

But not tonight.

Instead, we lit sage.

Or maybe more accurately—we created a moment.

We walked through the house together, ridding the house of “monsters,” and casting spells to only allow good dreams.

We didn’t argue about whether they were real.

We didn’t try to logic our way out of fear.

We gave it somewhere to go.

And more importantly, the boys felt like they had power.

It would be easy to call it a bedtime trick.

A strategy.
A parenting win.

But it didn’t feel like that.

It felt like remembering something I think we forget in the grind of motherhood:

That we are allowed to make things softer.
That we can meet fear with imagination instead of control.
That not every hard moment needs to be managed—some can be transformed.

Motherhood is full of these moments.

The ones that sit right on the edge of frustration:

• the bedtime battles
• the whining
• the exhaustion
• the I cannot do one more thing feeling

And sometimes… we don’t have the capacity to make them magical.

Sometimes we do say “go to bed.”

That’s real too.

But every once in a while, something shifts.

And instead of pushing through the moment…
we step sideways into it.

We soften it.
We play.
We create something that didn’t exist before.

Last night, my oldest son said:

“I’m so excited to sleep now.”

And I realized—

It wasn’t about the monsters.

It was about what happens when we choose presence over pressure.
Connection over control.
Magic over survival mode.

Not perfectly.
Not every time.

But enough to remember it’s possible.