“Mom, come out here and look at your son.”

Oh, how that is the real test, the test of my life.

He's calling to me from the living room. He just bit into a Sugar Daddy and pulled a loose tooth out. He's eight. He's so eight. Just everything about an eight year old boy – the crazy eight year old teeth, the gangly, floppy gate when he's being silly, the exuberance. And as I am plucking my face in the bathroom I hear him, and I know that if my life were a novel, this would be the foreshadowing of what is to come.

I wonder how well I step away from my ideas of how he's doing, or how I think he should be doing, and see him for what he is. Love him for what he is. Sometimes I think I'm tempted to keep ideas of the people I love locked in my heart, my collection of huggable dolls – rather than loving them in reality, apart from the way I would like them and their actions to relate to me.

I know that I can't, and wouldn't want to, know the full reality. There are some things that are decidedly not for me, who he is with friends, with God. But there are so many people in my own life that I would love to show my whole self to but I know our relationship could not sustain a full disclosure.

I love him. And every day it's a choice and a challenge to love him as completely as I can – on his terms, not mine.