My Mummy made it.

We gave away the first of the knitted bags today. It was the stripy blue booga bag and we gave it to The Boy's Prep teacher as a thank you gift. All of his class met this evening at the home of one of the other boys, and we ate and drank and made pizzas in their wood fired pizza oven and chatted and had fun. The Boy handed over the gift to his teacher and proudly stated "My Mummy made it".

I can't explain how that made me feel. It's probably one of those things that you have to be a Step-Mum to understand. To be proudly acknowledged as The Boy's Mummy is special, beautiful and bitter-sweet. The Boy's biological (I have to fight myself not to say "real" here) Mummy died when he was 14 months old. He was three months shy of 3 years old when I moved in, and he's six and a half now. I still have days when I feel like an imposter, like I'm not meant to be the Mummy. It's not meant to be me going to a party at the end of Prep, celebrating another milestone, it's meant to be someone else.

But then, The Boy chose to call me Mummy. We didn't force it on him, allowing him to work it out himself. Of course, with all the other kids at school using the word Mummy, perhaps he's just going with the flow. Even so, I choose to be proud and happy to be the Mummy of the young man who has become my little boy, and proud and happy to share that honour with the beautiful woman who held it before me.

Of course, true to form, I forgot to take a photo of the finished bag. So you'll just have to look at this photo of it blocking and imagine it upside down (making it the right way up for a bag), with handles!