Welcome to this week’s edition of the Five Minute Friday link-up!
If you’re new to the community, you can learn more about the link-up and how it works here.
This week’s FMF writing prompt is: USUALLY
Setting my timer for five minutes, and . . . GO.
If you’ve been following along for a while, you might be aware that my last born kid, my baby, is about to start his final year of high school on Monday.
Somebody hold me.
And it occurred to me the other day just how rapidly things have changed in these past few years of parenting teenagers, to the point where I almost don’t recognize my own life anymore.
All those things we “usually” did have vanished and are no more.
It used to be that I would wake up on school days and load up the car to drive kids to school. Now I only have one left at home and he drives himself there and back.
It used to be that we usually ate supper together, bodies filling chairs around the table. Now it’s a rare occasion on a Sunday after church and then only if my kid hasn’t gone to a friend’s house for lunch.
It used to be that I had a long list of very specific school supplies to buy every August — colored pencils and glue sticks and scissors and erasers and graph paper. Now they’re happy with a few binders and a few notebooks and last year’s pencils.
It used to be that I gave baths at night and quieted crying kids through the combing of the hair and laid out outfits for church on Saturday nights. Now they get their hair done by professionals and wash and iron their own clothes.
All those usuallys aren’t so usual anymore.
STOP.
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Join the link-up with your own five-minute freewrite on the prompt, USUALLY, below, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment:
It used to be that usually
Bella showed her sense of pride,
but things ain’t what they used to be
since Bella went and died.
We found the feisty little bitch
with her back quite broken,
in a flooded roadside ditch,
but our hearts were open
to a ten-pound hound of hell
who didn’t know she was disabled,
and to the Pit Bulls she would tell
that their egos were now tabled,
and they would have to make the scene
‘neath their new and badass queen.
Don’t know how long that took. Can’t see the clock through the tears.
Consider yourself hugged! My baby just moved into her first apartment three states away and I am officially in the “feeling lost” stage. Praying for you!
Oh my heart! My “kids” are married and with children of their own and I STILL miss those “usuallys”!