Our 6-year old son sleeps on the carpeted floor in our bedroom, just beside our bed. I am not proud to admit this. In fact, I’m flat-out embarrassed about it.

I was one of those moms who abhorred the idea of co-sleeping. I was the mom who sold the baby monitor at a yard sale, even as little Oliver still slept in a crib, because those baby sounds in the middle of the night were just too distracting and disturbing to my sleep.

So, as payback for my parental selfishness, our son moved into our room when he was 5 years old. It started gradually, with an occasional night spent cuddled next to our bed, wrapped in his red blankie, most often preceded by complaints of a scary dream. Those nights grew more frequent, and he wore us down over time. Eventually, we realized that he’d moved all of his favorite toys and books in and that we were now calling that side of the room, “Oliver’s bed.”

In addition to a complete lack of privacy, what this has translated to is that I hear every whimper and sigh that my son utters in the middle of the night. Over the glorious long weekend that just past, I started hearing little coughs from his side of the room. Those coughs grew deeper and longer, and three nights ago, we were up at 3 o’clock in the morning with him. Well, my husband was up, fumbling in the darkened kitchen for the bottle of children’s cough syrup, while I lie in bed wondering if anyone would be too upset with me if I just went back to sleep.

Oliver developed the 102-degree fever just before bedtime on Monday, our last Stay-Home-Day before school and work started back up.  The scramble for a babysitter didn’t pan out, as it rarely does for us anymore on such short notice. My husband and I began the negotiations. Whose clinic was more full of patients? Who could afford to take a Tuesday off? Who sacrificed the last time this happened? All the while, Oliver slept hard, medicated with grape-flavored cough syrup and exhausted from his restless night the night before.

One Saturday night back in the late 1980s – it must have been 1988 or 1989 – my friend Carrie and I were out “driving around.” This is what we did during our high school years, once my friends and I had our drivers licenses – and a car. In our small, one-high-school, one-movie-theater town, there wasn’t much for teenage kids to do. So, we drove around. We drove loops through the town, from the fast food restaurants on the west side, to the neighborhoods of the east side, and back again. We gossiped, we sang along with The Cure and the B52s and Drivin’ N Cryin’, we agonized over our current dating (or not dating) situations, and we looked for other friends who were out driving around, too.

On that night, Carrie and I were discussing what it meant to be a grown-up. Both of us were headed to college, and on that night, we might have known that I was heading to the University of Florida and that she was headed to Stetson. But that may have come later. I think it was Carrie’s idea, but I embraced it: being grown up meant buying your own toilet paper. Yes, that was it. THAT’s what it meant to be an adult. We christened the idea the Toilet Paper Rule.

I’ve bought a lot of toilet paper since that night, and I can look back on my 16-year old self and confidently say that we were wrong.

There have been many moments in my 40 years of life when the thought crossed my mind: “This is it. Now I’m a grown-up.”  Paying my bills in college, with money I earned from the job I worked while studying full time. Getting married and moving in with my husband. Having our first child over nine years ago.

Nothing has made me feel more my age, though, than caring for my sick father.

You all are the best. Seriously.

My family has had some challenging situations arise, and no matter what, I feel completely loved and supported by this community. To each of you who reached out to me after my last post, thank you. You lifted me up, as you always do, just when I need it most.

While we were in Louisville, my mother and I had dinner with my father’s brother, Uncle Boyce. My father is one of three boys; Dad is the oldest, and Boyce is the youngest. My dad and his brothers, though their heights, hair color, politics, and religious beliefs differ – prompting some terribly fun arguments when they all get together —  are really more similar than different on the inside, where it counts. So being with Boyce was like being with a shorter version of my dad. It felt good to be with him.

Boyce took us to a local restaurant favorite of his, Cunningham’s Creekside. My mother was familiar with the restaurant and had been to the downtown location way back when, long before it burned down in 2001. Mom and I ordered drinks – wine for me, bourbon for her – a necessity after the long day of travel and worry and hospital rooms, and we breathed deep for the first time in 24 hours. At the tables around us, couples and foursomes drank beer out of bottles, laughed and talked, and occasionally glanced at the sports news on ESPN on the televisions bolted to the walls around the dining room.

Our conversations drifted as we waited for our meals to be brought to the table. My mother and Boyce reminisced about the old bar that used to be down the road, the one with the older woman who belted out tunes on the piano, the songs growing raunchier as the night grew late and more drinks were thrown back. I heard the story of how my mother and father met, in a bar in Louisville. He was at another table, and she thought he looked like Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago, so she bought him a drink and had it sent over from her table across the room.