Welcome to the final FMF link-up of July 2023! Wow, this month flew by . . . could we go backwards and have a do-over, please?
No? Okay, I guess we’ll just keep writing, then . . . 😉
If you’re new to Five Minute Friday, a special welcome to you!
Click here to learn more about the link-up and how it works.
This week’s FMF writing prompt is: MILESTONE
Setting my timer for five minutes, and . . . GO.
We had a significant milestone at our house this week, so naturally, I wrote about it.
I’m cheating a little with my post this week since I technically wrote the following for an Instagram post and didn’t actually set a timer, but I’m sure you all will forgive me just this once, right? 😉
Here’s what I wrote, accompanied by the photo below:
This girl had the audacity to turn eighteen years old today. EIGHTEEN. I feel the weight of this milestone as if I’ve been carrying it myself all these years . . . and yet now that it’s time to set it down, I’d much rather turn around and trace my footsteps back in time. All the way back to the beginning, just after the doctor in the Cape Town delivery room said, “The baby’s in distress. We’ll have to perform an emergency Caesarean.” She made me a mom in a land foreign to me, and in a sense, we figured things out together. She has taught me more than I could ever express — making me try new things and go places I never would have on my own.
This picture is one of very few I have with her in my arms . . . Except for the rare occasion when she was sick, she would much rather be out there on her own, figuring things out, doing her own thing. In this photo, she and I had just made her first transatlantic flight to America . . . more than thirty hours of travel across seven time zones. (If anyone else has tried to pee in an airplane toilet with a baby in their lap, you are my people.) I can only guess that perhaps with everything else around her seeming foreign and new, she gave me this moment in my lap as if it were a kind of anchor, a familiar landing place, a steady and known foundation.
Two weeks from today, we’ll load up the car and drive her three-and-a-half hours away so she can start the next leg of her itinerary.
The Lord has graciously made her to be a strong, confident, and capable woman — and with Him at her side, I know she will do just fine.
Happy 18th birthday, my girl. It sure went fast. You may not need me to hold you anymore, but no matter how old you get or where you end up, you will always find open arms from me. I love you.
See the full post here:
If you’d like to read more about our adventures in South Africa or about me becoming a mother in Cape Town, I wrote a whole chapter called “Birth” in my memoir, A Place to Land: A Story of Longing and Belonging.
+++
Join the link-up with your own five-minute freewrite on the prompt, MILESTONE, below, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment:
Kate, thank you for sharing this. I’m charmed.
Now for the prompt.
Milestone is the prompt this week,
good word, and no baloney,
but my observation’s weak,
and I read minestrone.
Now, soup and I don’t get along,
neither thin nor thick,
and in my meal it don’t belong,
and veggies make it ICK!
But Barb, she really likes the stuff,
and on it will binge.
Of onions, she can’t have enough,
and it makes me cringe
and think back to my MRE’s
with tabasco sauce my taste to please.
Three minutes thirty. Glad it’s done.
This made me think about my oldest son Cain.He made me a special Mom of a son with intellectual and De disability and through all of this in milestones he got through some on his own. But with his.disabilites he.still have to have some help to get through milestones. .I am very proud of him. He will be 27 years old this year. But now I can not work because I got disability and he is helping me through my milestones. So since I can’t work now it gives me time to work on my writing, water coloring painting
Milestone
The conversation an unwanted and awkward moment, the words so tightly held aligned themselves single file to seep orderly through the crack in my meticulously constructed bunker.
Your face fallen flat and stoney, (my little brother always teased my unruly curls looked like Medusa’s) indelible in my memory. There is before and after, this hash on our timeline. Now is the question mark in between.
What a pecious photo. Love those eyes.