Writing Prompt

09/01/25

Here's your chance to write for five minutes with no stopping and no corrections. Send me what you write along with your 1-3 sentence bio to potentially be featured in a future newsletter and my social media.

Remember 5 minutes. No stopping. No corrections.

Ready?

Here's your prompt:

" power to protect "

My timed writing response is below, but try to do your own first so mine doesn’t affect yours!

Send me what you write along with your 1-3 sentence bio in an email: sunday @ sundaydutro (dot) com

I look forward to reading your submissions and wish you pleasure in the writing.

From the very first moment he arrived, I felt helpless and godlike all at once. I'd created this creature, well, me and his other genetic half, but I'd been the one to bear the brunt of the 27 hours of labor, I'd been the one to tear and require stitches, I'd been the one to worry over him the last nine months and now the rest of his life. I was everything in my power to bring him into this world I was now powerless to protect him from. And what an awful thing, that, to want to protect someone from the world. What does that say about this world, about me, about who I thought he was and would be. Not that we're shaped only by the outside world, but who would we be without it? Why would I want to stop my most precious creation from becoming by protecting him from the very thing that would help him become? And yet, I cocooned us both for months. Partly because nothing was going right and I couldn't solve it, not with friends or professionals, not with hoping or trying and trying again and trying yet again. My stubbornness and dogged determination perhaps the things that kept him alive but perhaps the very thng I ought to have been protecting him from all along.