About Just Write
“What ends up revealing itself when free writing is that everything has meaning. That is a magnificent gift of writing. If we write from a free heart-gut place, our souls start speaking.”

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In the morning I sneak away from the cacophony of the kitchen where the five oldest kids are already having breakfast.  I quietly open the door to Finn’s room and tiptoe in.    The rising sun is just filtering through the closed curtains at his window, bathing the room in a pale gray-blue light.  Burrowed face down in his crib, I rub his back and he giggles, staggering drunkenly to his feet in his just-awoken state, and reaching for me to pick him up.  I lift him and he wraps his stubby little arms fast around my neck and I carry him to the rocking chair across from his crib, and we sit.  He fits perfectly, draped over the mound of my belly containing the sister who will soon replace him as the baby of the family, his face buried in my neck as I breathe him in and savor these few quiet moments with him.

It’s been so easy to keep him the baby – partly because, yes, he does seem younger than his almost four years, and partly because he’s remained the youngest in the family for longer than any of the other kids did except Kevin.  Sometimes I feel guilty for babying him as I tend to do, but mostly I’m always thinking about how quickly it all goes by – much too quickly.  It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was curled up in a different rocking chair with Kevin, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone from my lap, itching to grow up.

So I sit with Finn, far past the age I was able to sit like this with the others, knowing that these moments are numbered.  For a few minutes, we exist in a cocoon of soft light, of quiet, of breathing together.

Before long, he untwines his arms from my neck and looks at me seriously and says, “Down.”  As he climbs down from my lap, he says, “Eat.”  He wants breakfast.  “Doggie!” he declares.  He wants to find Scout, his playmate.

And the moment is over.

And so begins another day.

Finn, Just Write, mothering