I hereby grant you permission to not have the best summer ever

To have no writing plan or strategy

To stay in bed on the days your head pounds and another wave of lingering Covid fatigue crashes down

To not improve

To not be the best version of yourself

To be a flawed and barely scraping by version of yourself soaked in grace

To not punish yourself when you feel like you deserve it

When something doesn’t go according to plan

When you’re not as far along as you think you should be

When you yell, “I never want to see you again”, waste the day, devour a bag of goldfish at the kitchen table in the dark

When you back out of plans and don’t reply to texts

When you give in to the OCD spiral

Choose grace anyway

Choose something delicious and delightful and disarming to do with your time

Jump in the pool, take a walk, brush your teeth

Write anyway, send the text late, kneel down and apologize to the kids, grab their hands and kiss their soft cheeks, let grace spill down like tears

Start over

Start over

Start over

Choose the always-moving-on memory of a child

Practice loving the flawed and barely scraping by version of yourself soaked in grace

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Permission Slip".