It’s writing prompt time!
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And now, for the prompt . . .
When Lisa-Jo Baker was the host of Five Minute Friday, she used this week’s writing prompt and it led to some beautiful and inspiring posts, so I thought we’d try it again. 🙂
This week’s Five Minute Friday writing prompt is: SHE
This weekend will mark My 10th Mother’s Day Without My Mom.
It’s true that the passage of time makes the ache less acute, but the ache is still there. It always will be.
As I’ve reached the phase in my own parenting journey where I’m trying to navigate how to mother teenagers, I realize more and more how much I under-appreciated my own mom.
When I think of what it would be like for my daughter to leave as a teenager for mission trips to Toronto, Honduras, or India, I can only imagine how my mom must have felt. Of course I didn’t realize it at the time. I couldn’t have known, having never been a mother before.
I can’t imagine what it would be like for my daughter to get on a plane alone before her 21st birthday to fly halfway around the world, only to return six months later and tell me she was turning around to go back indefinitely.
And yet my mom let me go.
I try (somewhat unsuccessfully) to reign in the worry of what could happen to my teenage daughter, and when I realize what I put my mom through and all the things that could have happened to me on any one of those trips or any one of the days of my life, one feature stands out:
She prayed.
She prayed for me and my sister every single day, multiple times a day.
I can only imagine the things I was spared from because she prayed.
STOP.
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Join the link-up with your own five-minute freewrite below, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment:
‘Twas Paul who sang “she loves you
and you know that can’t be bad”,
but ‘fore I knew this to be true
I nearly had gone mad
to throw away a God-sent grace,
a lady fine and brave
for I felt I had lost face
and would not deign to save
a marriage that would help me grow
from tall child to a man;
but dimly, then, I came to know
and slowly understand
that it was I who spoiled the dance,
and I knelt to ask for one more chance.
This is really beautiful. It makes me think about how humbling and surprising relationships can be. God’s grace is truly made manifest in our marriages.
Letting go is always difficult for mothers and thank you for sharing about your Mom.
It’s going to be four years without my Mom. We had a difficult relationship and yet we loved each other fiercely. I don’t have children, but I often wonder if I would be a better Mom than she was. I think I too would have struggled to let go.
She
She was my very first and one of my very best friends. She always saw the best in me and delighted in me much more than I did in myself. She modeled openness, creativity, generosity and a zest for living. She is forgetting day by day. I will never forget her. She is far away, cared for by other people, apart from me. She still lives in my mind and my heart. When I saw her last, she talked about her own dear mama, but only used the word “she” …. Names are not accessible to her now. I wouldn’t ask her if she remembered my name, but I know she knew my face, my smile, my voice. She is still a deep part of my life. I remember how she touched her world and try to touch mine in a similar way. She modeled teaching and loving and faith in her childlike, wonderful way. She still influences the world as I take my memory of her into my days. I wonder if someday my own daughter will remember me the ways I remember her. She is my mama and my friend.