Older Than

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I am older now. She has undone me, the ravishing redhead with innocent blue eyes, about to don the cap and gown that I never wore.

I’m older now than my mother was when I remember her seeming old to me. The wrinkles show, my hair I keep much shorter now. My eyes are not as wide as they were when I was a girl and my glasses obscure the angles of my face. I am easing into another life, or so it seems, one not riddled with the insecurities every young woman carries, but a woman now with more comfort in her skin. I am enjoying this stage where vacations are possible, choices are easier and I care less about what others think of me and more about the relationships I’m building with my children.

Older they are, older than I want them to be growing faster than I had anticipated and time, passing through open fingers as I grasp it’s liquid form begging to have some of it back.

Older are the stories I tell, the memories I cherish, and the photographs that fill the shelves where once a single scrap book stood, lonely and alone.

Older are the thoughts I have of returning home again to live in the places where my children were given birth to, somewhere between mountains and sky in the Denver of my adolescence. Older are my parents, my grandparents are fewer now, and I carry some with me through the vague remembrance of faces and voices from an ancient past I now tell my children about. How I long for them to know those who came before them and enabled their being through the DNA I carry in my bones.

Older, yet not expired, older but not unable, older and perhaps a little bolder.

I feel the most loved when...

This is my first contribution to five minute Friday for The Gypsy Mama's Blog  

Here’s how the game works: you simply stop, drop and write for five minutes flat! Set your words free. Don’t edit them, don’t fret over them, don’t try to make them perfect.

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I feel the most loved when …

I feel most loved when my children, with once downy heads wrap me in their arms; it is in that place a Mother knows that love is unconditional. In those moments the memories etch themselves beneath the surface of skin.

When chores are finished and the details of daily life are neatly tucked into the cubbies that hold all our wanderings and we come together and I feel loved. This organic reflection of worship where Jesus reveals himself through the love we lavish on one another, imago dei. Reflecting Jesus in their smiles, their prayers as we deeply love Him and one another.

My breakfast smoothie made with care, morning meds and cup of tea, with no request await me I feel dearly loved. Tending my bedside after surgery, no thought of self, effortless loving, serving as gift, as though it was his honor and not a burden.  It was then I felt most loved, cared for amidst post-op pain peace settling gently upon this thankful wife. The care of a man like God the Father.