Just Write {140}

It’s been raining a lot here, but when it isn’t, the sun shines hard but it never gets extra super hot like Austin. I saw a picture of some Austin friends on Facebook and they were at a baseball game with sweat dripping, their hair all wet with it. I can feel it through the screen, but then through my window screen at home I feel a soft breeze and remember all there is to love about Minnesota. Until winter, when I will remember all there is to love about Austin. It’s strange to look at these photos and think of our Texas home and friends because it’s been not just a whirlwind but more like a hurricane, bringing us back Home and to a New Life.

New Lives.

More and more I realize that as much as this family will always be a whole, we’ll always be separate, just as we were Before. That might not make any sense to anyone but me. But the reality I could never really face is that even my children are entirely separate from me, no matter how attached. That might seem so obvious, but it’s not, to a mother.

Now, when they are with Daddy, I think of them all the time and never stop being mom, of course. It feels weird and I can’t get it out of my head that I’m always going to be missing things they do and say. It hurts a lot. It’s quiet here when they’re away and even though I’m always hungry for quiet, it is the wrong kind of quiet. It is the deafening kind that isn’t peaceful, just empty. A void. And yet I carry them around in me all the time, with this belief that we are all one in our belonging, our connection, our hearts.

On this particular cool Minnesota Tuesday morning, they are sitting right here with me, and the birds in the back yard are terribly excited about the early morning. The breeze is chilly enough to make the kids reach for soft blankets on the couch. They yawn and stretch and ask for waffles. They fight over things and move on. They interrupt a lot. Miles is drawing and Asher has Nutella around his mouth. Elsie is calling from her big girl bed, because she hasn’t figured out that she can just get up and climb out. She is crib programmed.

That’s what it’s like, don’t you think? We get used to things as they are and we don’t know at all how to do the New Thing. So we wait for someone to tell us what to do and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Figuring it out for yourself leaves some of us sitting un-tethered believing we are imprisoned even in the rare times that we are not.

Elsie appeared upstairs after Asher called to her to tell her she could get up all on her own. Her eyes are shiny with sleep and the magic of having done something on her own, for the first time. She is beaming like the three year old little girl she is, no longer a baby at all and still my baby. A girl wanting to be both, that’s her right now, depending on the moment. I totally get it.

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This is the 140th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?