New Year...

We have started this New Year off very well indeed.  Sun is streaming in through the dining room windows, revealing not only a very dusty house but also a room full of kids in jammies, watching TV as the adults drink coffee.  Our group is twice the usual size this morning, thanks to friends who spent the night, and I am enjoying my favorite part of having houseguests-- snuggling in, all in jammies, for an extra-long breakfast, stretching out the time together.

If the way one spends New Year's Eve and New Year's Day is in fact indicative of how the rest of the year will go, then this year will be full of friends, conversation, video games, staying up late, sleeping in, coffee, cocktails, and the laughter of children.

Yes to that, please.

There is so much  I need to capture and record, the rush of the holidays and the slow, Aurora-time loveliness of our NY trip.  But I think instead I will tell you about a conversation I overheard in the backseat last night, on the way home from Rockin' New Kid's Eve.

Jack and Greg were sitting together in the way back, heads close, being goofy as usual.  Then, these words from our boy:  "We were at my Lulu's, my dad's mom, she lives in Aurora-- I think that's in NY?-- and we went in the barn and there is this attic and a bathroom and kind of behind the shower is a little room and I hid in there.  It's pretty creepy."  Greg: "Were you scared?"  Jack: "Nah. ..."

The conversation went on but my mind wandered to the creation of our childhood, the mythology we build around those moments of freedom, adventure, independence.   Jack had that experience, playing hide and seek with his cousins-- the exploration in the dark, the intense adventure, the feeling of absolute discovery, completely on their own-- and in the telling and retelling of it, he is creating his own story.  The moments he will remember and call back as an adult.  The formative sights and smells, the deep emotional memory that will jolt back to him at unexpected times in old buildings, on rural winter nights..

And I get to overhear it.  I get to watch and revel in the way he is growing, the wonder of his life unfolding and his own memories being made.

As babies, my children were no more than an extension of myself.  Something to dress and hold and showcase.  A wonderful way to get positive feedback for my own self-image.  Why yes, I DID create this lovely little thing, thank you very much.  And of course, even as they have grown and emerged into themselves, I search in them for facets of me, bits of my own responses and traits.  My life, reflected in their soft, smooth faces.

Listening to my boy last night-- my tall, sweet, silly, sensitive, kind boy--it was his OWN story he was telling.  His OWN life, separate from me.   His childhood, reaching forward into this New Year and into his future.  It is amazing and heartbreaking and beautiful and right.

I can't wait to hear the story he tells.