{stretch} 5 min Fri

 

Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.

Today's word from Gypsy Mama "Stretch" 

I remember a time when I felt stretched.

 I was pregnant with baby number four, platelets were low, thyroid was low.

 I had a little baby, a 3 year old and a school child.

Tani was two months away from getting his visa.

We didn't know if our children would end up English or Albanian!

It was warmer day than usual as I carried the 7 month old upstairs to her cot.
It was my last day of antibiotics for an infection.

I could feel my heart pounding, my legs weak, buckling, before I blacked out.  

I still think God must have caught her, and the little one still nestled inside.  Apparently He's got quite big hands :)

It is strange to bring up a family alone, just one or two to raise children, keep a roof, pay bills, deal with a hundred different bureaucracies, fold laundry, prepare meals, wash the pots after...

And childhood is so different. Full of "necessary" pressures.

It is a way of living far beyond that of the past, when communities and extended families worked to raise the children together. 

I often think of the Amish women washing jars and canning together, older children tending to younger ones as the work sung through the water, and their hands.

Togetherness takes the strain of the stretch.

My little girl tells me she wants to live with us in our little house forever. Her eyes are wide as skies.

And why should it not be? What is this "normal" aloneness?

Carving out our own island surrounded by other islands.

When I walk down the silent street in the evening and the lamps glisten on the asphalt. And the stars disappear in the swill of their orange glow  I see the flicker of screens behind every curtain of every house.

In some places people gather at dusk, out in green spaces under trees and women knit and talk and fires are lit.