Last night at 6:48pm it was still 35 degrees. I know because I sent a message to our family chat asking why we live in this hot *&^$ hole when it's like this every year. The recurring question we ask every Summer- where can we move to? South Coast? New Zealand, Tasmania? Any part of the coast where there's a breeze and it gets below 25 at night would be ideal. But instead we're here- which is where we are and where we'll be. For the time being, anyway.
Summer holidays faded fast. When you're a kid, six weeks feels like six months- theory of relativity and all that. I remember the distinct difference between each school year feeling like everything had changed and it taking forever before we had to start school again. The days stretched on and blurred into a mix of swimming in the pool, laying with our faces in front of the fan, icy poles and if we were lucky, a trip to the beach.
I've tried to create part of that for our own family because I want the kids to remember the long days at the beach, in the boat, at the bay that turn into late nights on the deck. I know they'll remain unaware of the mammoth effort to pack up the house and not even know about the pennies pinched during the year to allow holidays with endless icecreams.
I hope the smell of sunscreen and the salt air conjures up memories of summer nights spent playing with their cousins and holiday friends while the adults indulge in a few too many glasses of whatever, laugh a little too loudly and ignore their responsibilities for a while longer.
Now six weeks fly by in a blink. And at the end of it, everything is different, but it's also pretty much the same. There's equal parts of comfort, frustration and anxiety in the familiarity. Isn't there something else, something more, somewhere over the rainbow?
Although often recited, never have I ever understood the saying 'the nights are long but the years are short' so well. It rings in my head as I watch my wee boys growing, knowing there will be no more portacot to pack next year - again mixed emotions - absolute relief - (begging the sleep gods that no longer having a baby will mean more shuteye). But there's also a certain kind of sadness and longing -even though it's impossible to forget how long the nights have actually been for what feels like so, so long.
Some of this is a juxtaposition - motherhood hasn't come easily to me. I'm not a natural easy breezy mumzy mum. Physically, emotionally, mentally- I find it really fucking hard. My previous self has been so stripped away I barely recognise her anymore. I fear and have always feared mediocrity and I now am troubled because that's what feel I have morphed into. When I ask what I was before, I guess I can't really answer that? Was my identity so tied up with career and relationships that there's never really been a real me?
Part of me longs for the working at the ABC, coulda shoulda woulda been a food writer mid 20's me. Drinking cocktails with gay abandon and reading a book under an umbrella at the beach by myself, me. Part of me has wished away the really hard moments of motherhood, particularly at 3:00am.
There's also the part that knows how precious this time is and I yearn to find a way to make this year or next year or our whole lives different so that we can not only hold on to the precious parts, but create a life that is filled with those precious parts on a daily basis, ungoverned by societies usual expectations.
Before I can even make a January entry in the annual 'journal that is supposed to make my life magically better' - I'm buying school shoes and packing lunchboxes for preschool and daycare. Good intentions to call upon friends and finally catch up end up going out the window because post Christmas crazy, everyone is too tired and lethargic to give a shit. Those days are gone, evaporated into the stinking hot January air. And we're back into 'real life' as we know it.
Funnily enough, after the last paragraph, I'd taken pause to gather myself, and assess if I was just whinging. Leave it overnight, I told myself. So I did, and after dropping off the kids this morning, it was a happy coincidence that I ran into a couple of friends I haven't properly chatted to for yonks at the coffee shop and the topic spontaneously came up. I then stumbled across another friend outside Aldi where we got chatting, and again, not through my initiation- the topic came up.
One friend needs change- that's her solution. She's highly motivated, and very good at juggling her career and her family, and being the wife of a farmer. She likes a faster pace and is considering a life change to Tasmania to buy an old estate and do it up. Fast and slow all at once. However, she's a farmer's wife. The other is also a farmer's wife juggling the demands that come with little kids and a husband that is preoccupied on the farm, but finds solace in her work. She's an amazing artist and has just started to really get back to her art. The third is a creative girl with a livewire brain, stuck in a corporate world and wondering where the middle ground lies.
A few more spring to mind. One who wants to resign from her safe career and make her own way. She's got a plan and is in the process of gathering enough information and courage to take the plunge. And another, who told me recently that she - despite being very qualified and a powerhouse in her own right- has come to terms with being a support person for her family - and for the moment she's resigned to caring for her children and husband and nurturing a business they are building. Again- they are farmer's wives so somewhat stuck geographically.
It seems it's not just me, and I'm not just whinging. Well, I am, but there's an undercurrent of discontent and there are hoards of women in the mid 30's- 40's riding that wave wondering - Is this it? Maybe it's our own fault because we're the ones who have done things in somewhat a traditional order. Uni, Travel, Career, house, marriage or long term relationship, kids and then what? Is this a symptom post becoming a mother, is it just mid life crisis territory? Is this why people renovate or have affairs? But what? What next? And what's it all for?
Do we just continue to send our kids to regular schools, take a regular 9-5, pass our partners like ships in the night and live for the holidays and the moments in between the madness of operating within the matrix?
That seems kind of a waste of life and time and my children's childhood to me. They've (I can't name they exactly- but you get it) have built a post industrial world that's regimented and fits into categories where suburban life with weekends off to mow the grass is hailed as a dream.
It's not my dream, but I'm floundering and I don't have an answer, or even an idea what is next for me - in terms of work or my dreams and aspirations. I think about my life path and all I see is fog, so Universe, If you're hearing this- I'm open. Open to adventure and possibility and change and routine and something soul satisfying.
All I do know, is that when I don't know, I usually find myself heading to the garden, collecting some bedraggled veggies, opening up my cook books and beginning the rhythmic, meditative work of chopping, and stirring. There's more questions, of course.
Should I cook something new, some previously un-attempted Ottolenghi dish or something that's in the recipe box that houses my most prized and most cooked recipes?
There's equal parts of comfort, frustration and anxiety in the familiarity but we have to eat, and it may as well be delicious.
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