Five Minute Friday: INCLUDE

Today’s prompt: INCLUDE

Today, at my work, I had written something summarizing another piece of information (it’s what I do at this job). The client asked for me to include a link to a different site that would help the reader understand more about the topic.

Don’t you want to be the hyperlink in others’ lives?

Okay, maybe it’s just me, so I’ll own it.

I want to be the hyperlink in others’ lives, the person who helps them think a bit more deeply about topics, talk more articulately about them, and (most of all) see other angles so as to be more accepting and open about the world.

I had hoped to write this post for Mother’s Day as a tribute to my mom, but we are going out of town so five minutes is it and she deserves so much more.

HOWEVER, she was the deepest hyperlink of all in my life.

We didn’t always see eye to eye, and it took me way too long to appreciate her selflessness, but it is only through her — through a girl who grew up deep in the country, in relatively bare bones accommodations, living off the land — the same girl who insisted on going to kindergarten at age 4 because she followed her sister to the bus and just demanded to go because she wanted to learn — that I can find the “deep” background that ultimately makes me who I am.

She deserved a different end to it all, for sure. I am grateful, though, that the way everything unfolded gave me time to sit with her and just “be” for about two months. I’m not sure how “deep” we went during those visits, but it was an important investment in each other before our hyperlink of life was deactivated.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “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.” (But I can’t resist spell checking, as you can imagine.)

This post was originally published on Medium as Five Minute Friday: INCLUDE.

Paula Kiger

Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.