Release (Five Minute Friday)

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This is Monday, but I am still going to release my perfectionism and write the Five Minute Friday post. It has been harder to sit down and write these Five Minute Friday posts lately. I am not sure if the words just don’t immediately spark an idea like they sometimes do, or if I have just been challenging myself in other ways recently.

There are many things we must release in life. We release our children to go to school, knowing they will be back in just a few short hours. Eventually they graduate and we release them to adulthood and going away to college, but still, we know they will be back.

Again they graduate, but this time from college. Some come back to live at home and others don’t. When they come back to live, they are constantly thinking about moving out, getting a place of their own, adulting full-time. We as parents would rather keep them safely tucked under our wings where we can know they are safe. But alas, they fly the coop and decide to move out and sign a lease on a place committing them for the next year or more. What is a parent to do? We must release them. We must trust that we have done our jobs and taught them well. We must release them to make their own mistakes just as we did when we were young. We must release them and give them the chance to prove how well we trained them up and how much they paid attention to what we taught them.

Once the last child has moved out of the house, and it looks like it will be this way for at least a year or more, we must release their space and recreate it to suit our own needs and move on. We didn’t want them to leave, but we had to let them go.

Our last little chick left the nest at the end of February/beginning of March and we have been asking for the room to be cleaned out. We made plans for the room once it was certain the last chick was fleeing the nest. Five or six weeks later it is no more ready for our purposes so we must take matters into our own hands and help the little chick pack up the remainder of the stuff in the old nest. It is a sad time, but we have happy plans for this space and with a couple of days of very hard work, we made it happen.

Sometimes it is the chick as much as the parents who must release themselves into the big bad world. Perhaps they think if they never completely move out they will have an excuse to come back. They don’t need an excuse! We hope the kids will still call and stop by, but there are no guarantees in this life, so we, as parents, must make a new life and release the old one where we were parenting our kids full time. We didn’t push them out of the nest, we let them decide when they were ready to take that leap of faith and try flying solo.

After almost 27 years of parenting, we are really empty nesters now. We are releasing the old and making room for the new. We are reclaiming our home one room at a time. Stay tuned for before and after pics of the nest repurposing project.

Here is a little preview of what we released this weekend. You see it right?

Here is what I see when I look at the photo above, one very large dust bunny! You just have to release your inner child and go back to the days when you stared at the clouds and saw shapes in them.

(No, I didn’t arrange the dust before taking the picture but the bunny just jumped out at me once it was on my computer screen and I couldn’t help myself!)

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Release
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

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