Five Minute Friday - Choose

On Fridays a bunch of brave writers gather here to all spend 5 collective minutes writing on a single prompt. It’s a great way to catch your breath at the end of a long week. This blessed, beautiful place where we open our hearts and let words and tears and the inner workings of our lives bleed and flow and dance across the virtual pages. Yes, this community opens wide and invites you in to share. Come and visit and read. You will be blessed.

This week: Choose

Go

Dear Bug,

I can’t write tonight because all my thoughts are on you. Your Mama’s words seems to be stymied. I’m frozen and stuck because there’s nothing to undo normal like trouble in your child’s world. Big or small, it throws up a stop sign and the universe realigns for a moment while you catch your breath and assess what happens next.

I have to keep telling myself that this season you’re in is so very normal. And there are so many worse things that could be happening. Like what, I’ve never had a bad day? A bad week? Sure. It’s just amplified times the beating of my heart that wants so desperately to shield you from the bad and the ugly and just give you the good. While still managing to give you all the experience and learning you need to get your lumps in and learn your lessons. So not really a stretch of reality – is that what I’m wishing?

No. Not that either. But the lessons. Oh, the lessons and their learning. I feel them imprinting on my heart and my skin as if it were me all over again. Until my nerves are raw and I just want to be elsewhere.

I want to be free to run off to the movies at the drop of a hat – no babysitter. Have extra money to spend at Stanley and Seaforts or some other nice restaurant that has entrees with prices tags of what we spend on one family dinner. I want to book time shares by the ocean and not have to worry about school schedules. I want to not worry about school. Ever. Unless I’m going back for my Masters in Fine Arts. I want an extra room – you know, the one that was supposed to be my office – room for more books, more pens, more crafty stuff. I want to have the option to choose to sleep in – and I mean in – without worrying about what might have gone missing from the cupboard or ‘fridge when I wake up. Silly stuff like that.

But here’s a secret little girl:
I want you more.
And I will always choose you.
Every.
Single.
Time.

I write that with every tear that I may cry for the next thirty years and with every tired smile that I will give you for another thirty after that. I will choose you when you are having your very best day and you’re a homework super star; when you’re smiling and skipping, and laughing so hard you can’t stand up. And I will choose you on your lowest of low days, when the ache inside is so hard and so violent that you feel like you can’t breathe for the pain of it. I will choose you when you’re screaming on the inside and out. I will choose you when you are silly like a puppy. I will choose you when you have no idea where to turn and just need a place to bury your head and shut the world out. I will chose you.

Every.
Single.
Time.

I choose you because I love you. I choose you because you are mine – of my breath, of my skin, of my heart, of my soul. I choose you. And that much – that one little piece – will always be there.
Count on it.

Stop







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