Friday, time to crack open the chocolate ice cream and unscripted version of beautiful you!

Got five minutes? Let’s write. Let’s finger paint with words –>{click to tweet}.

Let’s just write and not worry if it’s just right or not. Here’s how to play along:

1. Write for 5 minutes flat for pure unedited love of the written word.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in {you can grab the button code in my blog footer}
3. Go leave some comment props for the five minute artist who linked up before you {and if you love us, consider turning off word verification for the day to make it easier for folks to say howdy}

It’s a great way to catch your breath at the end of a long week.

OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes for the prompt:

Afraid

GO

I’m brave and not brave at the same time. I’m turned inside out and I can wear new clothes but my insides take much longer to update. I watch my girl sleep. I could build a shrine right there at the side of her crib where one of her dimpled feet hangs limp through the slats and just pray the same two prayers on repeat.

Dear Jesus, thank you for Zoe. Dear Jesus, please don’t let anything happen to Zoe.

If I reach over and butterfly kiss those cheeks she might shift and stir and open her heavy lids to look at me. I’m not sure she sees me though. But either way the words that come out of her mouth are the same, “Mama? Mama?” Always me always first and I can’t hold in all this love that is pounding through me.

I want to crush her. Instead I gently lift her soft body up and out and into my arms as I sink into the old rocker that’s spent countless nights like this. Just to hold her a little longer. Just to soothe myself in her smell, her soft wispy hair, her life that makes mine feel so much fuller. She is peace wrapped in skin and I can’t get enough of it. I know this stage will end. People tell me about daughters and the tug of war they can wage on their mother’s hearts. But this sacred stage, right now all is still peace and I take desperate gulps of it like a drowning woman.

When the laptop blinks at me with waiting emails, when the dishes pile up, when the playroom or the back yard morph into a graveyard where toys go to die, when I don’t think I can respond to one more request for attention from anyone, I back into a dark corner with Zoe and just remember to be.

We rock and I feel the carpet soft between my toes. The music is on the same Christian station we always listen to that simultaneously drives me mental with its wretched slave to repetition while also comforting some whiney part of me. She strokes my arm with the back of her hand. Always and even in her sleep, she caresses me and soothes us both.

Dear Jesus, thank you for Zoe.

Dear Jesus, please don’t let anything happen to her.

STOP