The Terrible Twos: A Beautiful Hurt That Reflects Us

Nights are the hardest. My son was running wild around the bedroom, refusing to settle down. We’d asked him multiple times to come to bed so we could read together, but he was in that overtired, overstimulated state that every parent of a toddler knows too well.

So I tried a different approach — I lay down and pretended to sleep.

Instead, he ran full speed at me and headbutted me. Hard. Like an NFL player without a helmet. I immediately started crying from the pain. And he laughed.

Twenty minutes later, during our nursing-to-sleep routine, I told him “I love you,” like I always do. And for the first time ever, he looked at me and said:

“I love you too.”

Those two moments — the headbutt and the “I love you too” — happened within the same hour.

And that’s the terrible twos.

→ Read the rest of the reflection on the blog