I am in bed. My husband, who can sleep through anything, is snoring softly beside me. I am aware that my teen-age son, a college freshman, has come home either very late at night or more likely very early in the morning. I don’t bother to roll over and check the clock on the dresser.

Suddenly I hear the faint sound of light, glazed ceramic nestling against ceramic: The cookie jar in the kitchen has been opened, then quickly closed. The search for homemade cookies is futile, and so the quest for a snack will continue in the cupboards and proceed to the freezer where a microwavable burrito lies in wait.

In the split second it took to register the familiar sound of my cookie jar opening and closing, I also registered a familiar feeling in my gut: just the slightest trace of guilt. My cookie jar was empty.

I repeat: split second. Guilt over the lack of homemade cookies does not consume me; trust me. But it was an odd sensation to ponder in the quiet half-darkness of an Alaskan night. Why does there lurk within me, a mom now for over 25 years, the need to see that the cookie jar, metaphorically at least, is still full?

Parents note the changes their children experience as they grow up, and I have always measured them by summers. Summers are short in Alaska, but they are full of light. There are only about five hours of semi-darkness in Anchorage in the heart of summer, much less up north where darkness is banished for the season.

Emerging from the darkness of winter, it always seemed that a new child had emerged then also, especially one as attuned to the outdoors as my son.

The summers in Anchorage are mild, and Mike lived them outdoors. My son’s initial summer universe was our large yard and the yard of the boy next door. I still have notes written in childish script detailing the hunt for extraterrestrials that Mike and his buddy conducted from their yards. The white-haired lady who lived down the street was their prime suspect.

Later Mike was allowed certain parameters with his bike — first from this mailbox to that mailbox, another summer around so many blocks. Soon the summers came when he traveled miles each day on his bike, creating jumps first at the nearby park and then at the sandpit far away. In the blink of an eye it was the summer of the first driver’s license and the first real job.

People marvel at how their children grow and change, but sometimes I think we neglect to realize that we are growing and changing too, that they are teaching us something in the same way that we hope we are teaching them — by example, by love.

How often I, the consummate worrier, sought solace in Christ’s caution against anxiety: Do not worry about tomorrow.

This winter, Mike went far away to college. He spent the second semester renting a house with others, leaving the dorm experience behind. He emerged into this summer’s sunshine more a man than the boy who left us last August. Now we grant him more freedom.

When I lean toward worry, my husband responds, “Effie, you had your chance,” as if to say now it’s up to Mike.

Yes, I had my chance, and I thank God for that. And if I still have the impulse to keep the cookie jar full, well, I guess you never entirely stop being a mom.