I am sitting at my computer, window shopping at Etsy for the various things on the Christmas list Sam and I made the night before. I am unsure just exactly how to fulfill this tall order, as he has decided that everyone he loves shall have a hat for Christmas. Some hats are easy--a frog hat for his beloved Diane's brand new baby, well, there are pages and pages of baby frog hats on Etsy. I pick a cute one and put it in the cart. A dragon hat for Jim--again I find a great dragon hat, but I'm not sure Jim would ever wear it (not to mention the fact that he HATES getting presents), so I put it on the favorites to think it over (and someone else snaps it up before I can make up my mind). But for Shelley, Sam wants a cup hat. And I wonder, what the hell is a cup hat?

And I notice that it happens more and more often these days that I ask myself that question--what the hell does that mean? Because somewhere in the past two weeks, must have been when I was making lunch or something, Sam grew up. Or, that is, anyway he grew out of toddlerhood and into little kidhood. One morning he got himself up without waking me, packed up his potato heads in a little bin and lugged them into Husband's room and woke him up to play instead instead of me! And when I woke up two hours later I felt like a brand new human being. It was the kind of luxurious, luscious sleep I haven't had in over three years, it was marvelous.

And he has done that every morning for two weeks and I can feel the difference in every cell of my body. Before I go to sleep at night, which now is when I'm ready rather than when the nagging voices tell me I should, I have learned to make Sam a yoghurt smoothie and a little peanut butter sandwhich and leave it in his special spot in the fridge to keep him fortified until I get up.

And he plays by himself so much more often and makes up many stories and words and worlds that all are all new to me, mysteries, things I don't entirely understand, things that live inside Sam, belong to Sam, that are all his own.

And on Jim days he runs out to meet Jim, comes back in and grabs his own clothes from the dresser (because he is otherwise always naked), heads out the door and I don't see him again for a couple of hours. A COUPLE of HOURS.

And I am sitting in my office shopping, lollygagging, dawdling, looking at all the pretty trinkets, wandering around shops that have nothing to do with Christmas hats, looking at things I love, doing and thinking things that are all my own. I am loving this stillness, the calm I feel because finally I have that sense of ease, that true knowing that Sam is fine. That frissure of anxiety that kept my shoulders hunched whenever I used to try to do anything else but be totally focused on him is gone. Somewhere in the night, or perhaps in the late hours of that first marvelous morning, it just left me. I am always attuned to my boy, but now in a way of circulating connection, not anxious worry.

Some mornings he still needs me to get up with him. Some days he still wants to play with me all day long. But things are different now, he is just so much more himself, separate from me. There is, of course, a way in which I grieve this, but it comes with the release of such a weight I didn't even know I was carrying that I can embrace this new phase of our lives with open arms. Now I know what it's like to just be, just be with my son, with my family, with myself.

I am loving this. But I still don't know what the hell a cup hat is...