A Letter to the Summer of 2025

Dear Summer of 2025,

It’s hard to see you go. I don’t want the warm days, the glistening pool water, the sound of a ceiling fan, and the days off from teaching to end. At the same time- you were not very good to me, summer of 2025. You hurt me in ways that I wasn’t expecting, and I feel a little bit like I was put through the ringer by you. I guess I shouldn’t blame it ALL on you, summer. It was also partly spring’s fault. Spring was stupidly difficult for our family, and I thought that when we entered the glorious days of summer, things would be so much better. So, summer- maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s me. Or maybe let’s just blame spring.

If I look back through pictures and social media posts, it really looks like you and me got along great, summer. It really looks like we were having a great time. And you know what? There were some great memories and some really fun times. We went to Niagara Falls, we enjoyed a DeValve family reunion and a Hines family reunion. We went to the Ohio State Fair and someone gave us a pool! We went to the library almost weekly and my kids had a true “90s summer” with you- basically nothing on the schedule, with long, slow days at home.

Based on all those things, it should have been a perfect summer, right? Right? Well, not quite. You see, summer 2025 was a time of huge transition for our family. And we didn’t know what we didn’t know, but the transitions turned us upside down and inside out and everything felt…off. Everything felt like it was in great upheaval. Nothing was really the same as what we had known before. We all felt it, and we all reacted in different ways.

Theo getting a new job sent him on a completely new trajectory. While he is doing wonderful at the job, there were many moments that felt like drowning. And not only drowning- but like someone was pushing us down and keeping us under the water (not a specific person, just Life in general). He is doing such great job, and slowly is learning how to swim, but this summer 2025- you will stand out as the summer that we almost drowned. It affected everything- our homestead, our kids, our mental health, our marriage. We knew that giving up wasn’t an option but there was a lot of what-were-we-even-thinking days (and lets be real- nights). As is true for anything, a time of great trial often leads to a time of great growth, and that is what I have seen in Theo this summer. He’s grown in more ways than I can count. He’s grown in his public speaking abilities, his spiritual walk, his mental health, his marriage, his parenting. Most people only get to see the outward side of this growth, but as I’ve walked with Theo every day of this summer, I’ve seen his immense inner growth. I’ve seen the tears and the angst and the prayers and I’ve also already seen the fruit of it all.

Meanwhile, summer of 2025, you dumped me into a pit of deep loneliness. I suddenly felt like I had no friends. Perhaps it was simply a misperception, but I felt that because of Theo’s new job, many people wanted to “respect our privacy” and just stopped talking to us or checking in on us. And the friends who did check in on us I felt like I couldn’t give an honest answer. No one wants to hear how hard it is for the person who is leading things. No one wants to hear if things in the background aren’t going well. From the outside, our school operates like a well-oiled machine, but now that I’m the wife of the person who operates the machine, I realize how often things can be falling apart behind the scenes and absolutely nobody knows. (This is NOT saying that our school is falling apart or that things are being swept under the rug or hidden from public perception- I actually believe fully that it is thriving and the many people who work there are amazing!! The school truly does run incredibly. But there are many details and flawed humans working together, and so things do sometimes fall apart. Most times they are put back together again- but without the public knowing, and this is how it should be!) There is also the extreme privacy aspect of this whole thing. Information flows to Theo, and has to stop with him. It simply cannot go beyond him. I heard someone say “Leadership is lonely” and that seems to sum up our summer of 2025 for me.

I don’t know, summer, at the beginning of this stretch of time, I really thought that our family was going to get a reprieve from the exhaustion that life has thrown at us the past few years. Instead, we had even MORE on our shoulders, but nobody knew (and dare I wonder in the darkest of night if nobody cared?). It would not be appropriate to complain or hang our dirty laundry, so we took one step at a time, one day at a time, and clung to the Lord and each other like never before.

So, summer of 2025, I guess that I actually do have a lot to be thankful for. You gave us a hard time, and we grew because of it. We grew through it. And while it might not be what I had planned or what I had wanted, it was what we needed to build a firm foundation for our family, to take away everything that doesn’t matter so we can focus on the things that do matter above all else.

With gratitude and a little bit of hurt feelings,

Suzanne