My Real Life

Wanna just write? Without wondering if it’s just right?

The Friday Five is taken from The Gypsy Mama.  5 minutes of pure, unadulterated writing.

Today’s topic is:

Every Day

Every day I get a million things done and put off the laundry.  Every day, I say to myself, “You gotta do the laundry or it’s going to pile up and up and up until it’s more than you can handle.”  Every day I say that and then I let it wait until the next day anyway.

Every day I wonder if I’m the only one who rethinks conversations they’ve had and wonder if they sounded as stupid as they think they sounded.

Every day, I am grateful for what I have and wish I was doing more for those who have less.  Every day I think this and then I think that wishes aren’t actions and I need to quit wishing and start doing.

Every day

Stop

Just a reminder that the Friday Five is a chance to just write…no worries about errors or content…just write for five minutes.

Write from your heart.

Today’s prompt:

Motherhood Should Come With…

Go.

A rule book that begins by saying “None of these rules apply.  Your children will be unique and different from other people’s children, and so what works for your neighbor probably won’t work for you.  They are also completely unique and different from each other, so the techniques you used for your first won’t work for your second, and what worked with your second won’t work with your third.  Basically, Mom…you’re on your own.”

Armor for your heart.  Your heart will break a million times over when your child is mistreated by other children on the playground or not understood by his or her teacher.  Your heart will also break when you have to send them to their room or take away a favorite toy, and you will finally understand the saying “This will hurt me more than it will hurt you.”  Your heart will break when they shout at you “You don’t love me!” and it will feel irreparable when they yell, “I hate you!”  Because even though you know that you love them more than they’ll ever know and that they don’t hate you, not even one little iota, and despite the saying about sticks and stones, you’ll know that words can definitely harm you.

A bigger rib cage, because as much as your children will break your heart on a daily basis, your heart will expand to sizes you can’t imagine possible.  At least as many times as your heart breaks, your heart will fill with love double that amount every time you see your child run off the school bus toward you, or catch them in a quiet moment, playing sweetly with each other.  When you see your three older children crowded around their baby brother, and see him smiling at them as if there were nothing better in the whole wide world than these three “big” people, your heart will grow.  When you sneak into bedrooms to kiss sweaty, sleepy heads, you’ll inhale their scent, cover their shoulders with the covers, and whisper ‘I love you’ over and over in a mantra that you can never quite say enough.

A box of tissues to wipe away your tears of joy and pride when they graduate from pre-school, get the role they want in the school play, make a touchdown, and learn to roll over.  Tissues to wipe away the tears of anticpated sadness at the fact that they will, one day, leave you to begin their own lives, and despite the fact that they will come home to visit and will always be your babies, their lives are not truly yours anymore.

One more child than you thought you wanted because these surprises first stun you, then amaze you, and then make you wonder why you ever thought the previous number was enough and you wonder how you all ever survived without this little one.

Patience because you’ll need it, and because you’ll need to teach it to your children, because Lord knows, you aren’t perfect either, Mama, and the babies need to be patient with you, too!

Time’s up.

Following the lead of some bloggers who I read, I’ve decided to do a Friday Five today.

The following are five things that you probably didn’t know about me.

You probably really don’t care, either, but there it is.

1.  I am hoping against hope that Monkey in the Middle loses his tooth while I’m at work today.  A slightly wiggly tooth I can deal with.  A wiggly tooth that is barely hanging by a nerve gives me a totally icky feeling in the pit of my stomach and completely creeps me out.  Some mom, huh?

2.  In the spring, I outlined my next three novels.  All that was left to do was fill-in, write some dialogue and background and that would be it.  I made a summer goal of writing for an hour a day. We’re closing in on August and I haven’t written a single word.

3.  I’m thinking about buying a used violin or cello from eBay and teaching myself to play this fall.  It is the one instrument that I always wanted to learn how to play and never did.

4.  One of my favorite sounds in the world is the sound of a typewriter.  I think if I had a typewriter, I would have written those three novels this summer…correction tape and all.

5.  I am, right now, completely obsessed with Eminem’s new song and just about lose control of the van trying to turn it up every time it comes on the radio.

And there you have it.

Whether you wanted it, or not.