Writing Journal | Holiday realisations: parenting, body image and growing older but not weaker.
If you’re anything like me you have all sorts of thoughts running through your head at one time. A recent illness, a change in the family structure or a holiday for example can make your head start whirling with ideas, paragraphs and sentences, and you wonder how they all link together.
On my Substack I want to write down these thoughts. I don’t just want to ignore them or leave them in a journal (in this instance I haven’t even journaled these particular thoughts - I’ve put no pen to paper in the last couple of weeks). I want to record them here and to see if, eventually, these thoughts develop into something: a book, a longer essay, a chapter…
Sometimes you don’t know what works until you put it out there. I’m sharing my work as Austin Kleon advocates. I’m putting my less polished work out there into the world and see how it tastes, grows or dies a death.
I’ve recently returned from eight days in Portugal. It was our first holiday as a family in three years. And I had a number of realisations…
Thanks to Covid it’s been nearly three years since we had a holiday as a family. Back in 2019 my daughter was ten, my son had just turned 16 and I was a different kind of parent. As in, I was the mother of children. Plural.
Looking around me at the hotel in Portugal I could see the parent I used to be with the children I used to have. The children would be tirelessly swimming in the pool: jumping in, handstands, diving for those coloured sticks (in my day we’d dive for a coin). They’d be having meltdowns when something happened they didn’t like, or they would drop a glass in the restaurant. They’d be asking for ice-cream (okay, that hasn’t changed) but it would be all around their mouths and dripping down their outfits.
I turned and looked across to the sunbed next to me. There was my strapping son, my firstborn baby but no longer a child. He’ll be nineteen in a few days and no longer favours cute camouflage swimming trunks from Boden. He has red stubble coming out of his chin (he’s a very proud ginger), huge feet and strong hands that came in useful whilst I was being battered by the waves and couldn’t get back on my feet (more about that later). I’m enormously proud of my little boy and the man he has become.
And then there’s my ‘little’ girl. A girl who has always known her own mind. She’d choose her outfits herself from an early age and would often walk around our old paddock wearing fairy wings with wellington boots. I remember holding her on my hip and in fact, the last time we went to Portugal I was doing just that. In later holidays I’d be watching her all the time whilst she was in the pool: jumping in, forward rolls, backward rolls and in the sea I would always make sure myself or my husband was looking out for her.
Now, she paddles over to me after a medium-sized wave has just crashed over my head and, remembering the drama a few days previously when I was being battered by one wave after another, she is the one saying to me, are you alright? Do you need to hold onto me?
My little girl is now thirteen and taller than me. A fact she regularly reminds me of.