So I have to admit that I lied to y’all. Because I’m pretty sure that at some point in the past I said something like “this is my favorite age” or something similar about some age that is not five. And I was a liar.
Because this time of year with a five year old is. my. favorite. thing. ever.
Ever.
Better than Starbucks on a cold morning. Better than that moment just before someone you love kisses you. Better than anything.
J is so excited about all the things this year… excited about Santa, excited about the upcoming advent calendar, excited about s’mores and watching Home Alone. He is counting down the days until he can count down the days to Christmas and I am seriously loving every stinking minute. He’s even started washing the dishes after dinner because then “Santa will bring him even MORE presents,” in his own words.
There are still the moments… the minutes and hours and even days where or when he drives me to the brink of crazy and back again, drawing headaches on my brain in explosive red ink, in that way that only our loved ones can. There are still the days when my patience is fried from work and I get home and the last, I mean the VERY last thing I want to do is listen to my kid tell me about how this or that child pushed him or this or that teacher told him “good job” on something small. But I listen… because that’s what we do.
And in the midst of all that drama and crazy, there are also the moments when he wraps his ever-growing arms around me and announces that he loves me. In the midst of the tears and “DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN” there are also the moments when he’s lying on his stomach, lanky legs kicking in the air behind him as he squints and bites his tongue to sound out the words in his letter to Santa. (A letter that inexplicably includes a request for “an automatic water dispenser tub” which is a device of his own creation that involves me holding a large cylinder of water which fills up a bathtub in the living room… you know, so he can watch tv while he takes a bath.)
There are moments when I’m so in love with my kid that I feel like I could cry over the time that’s already behind us, and an equal number where I want to sigh in exasperation over the days to come.
But above all else, five is so much … fun. It’s full of creativity and expression, full of spontaneous explosions of love and quiet moments of witnessing his self-discovery. Five is drama and intensity and over-powering emotions as this little man in my life finds himself and his personality and plants himself into hopes and dreams outside of my own.
As Christmas hovers just over the horizon, I watch this little boy stitch together his world with his brand of humor and, yes, crazy, and I’m just blown away. Just full on blown away, by how far he and I have come from the broken down stagecoach of a twosome we were when we hobbled back from Savannah post-divorce. We’re happy, we’re thriving, we’re a family of two that could happily expand to three or even four and still be, well… perfect. Five is the first time I’ve been able to see just how far we’ve come, just how well we’ve done in this crap shoot of a job called parenting. Five is the first time I’ve heard my own words come from his mouth, my own thoughts pour from his mind… and I’m just so proud of who he’s becoming. And dare I say that yes, I’m proud of who I’m helping him become, proud that we’ve managed to make this work for three plus years and that he’s turning out so wonderfully awesome because of or maybe in spite of it all.
Over all, it’s just that five is… awesome. And five at Christmas is my favorite… my all time favorite. Because it is perfectly eccentric and weird and awesome. Just like me and this crazy kid I’m raising.
And I fully expect for five to be my favorite all the way until next year. When maybe six will take over.
