Just

My eldest daughter, A, is enraged when I use the word just. As in, I’m just a mum.

Don’t say that, she says, crossly.

I used to think she scolded me because, as a feminist, she was mildly embarrassed by the fact her mother had never forged a proper career.

Why do we do that? Why do mums who don’t go out to work do that – say I’m justamum – because I’m not the only one.

Is it because if I were a – say – a teacher, like my daughter, my sister, or if I were a journalist who worked on a paper, 9 to five, Monday to Friday, I’d say,’I’m a teacher. I’m a journalist’. I’d never say, ‘oh I’m just a teacher, just a journalist’.

Funny that. Because they’re proper jobs. With salaries? Employers? Recognition? Accolades?

Is it because, if we have children, we are necessarily mothers by virtue of gender and biology. Just like we’re wives or sisters or daughters. You’d never introduce yourself, ‘I’m A; I’m a wife, sister, daughter’. Even then I must qualify my position – I’m A’s Wife, B’s Mum. Because, ordinarily, I am meeting people within the context of others’ lives. Their work, their schools.

I’m a Mum. A pregnant pause. And …? What else are you?

It’s easier, always easier, to say, Justamum, and I deliver it with a little laugh. People know then not to ask anything further – and usually they don’t. Ah right. They move on and you’re spared the discomfort of having to say, because You’re a Mum, ‘nope that’s it. Just a Mum’. You’ll say it in end.

But I am, I say to my daughter the next time she ticks me off, it’s what I am. It’s what I do.

What I have always done.

‘Then say that’, says my daughter A with a hot glare, ‘say, I am a Mum’.

And then she says, so that I know she is not, has never been, embarrassed by what I do.

‘Don’t diminish what you do with just‘.

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Charity

A child taps impatiently at my car window. Tap, tap, tap. He won’t be ignored. He is small, wearing dirty shorts and shod in bare feet. He’s pushing a young man in a makeshift wheelchair whose legs are tangled in a useless knot.

It’s hard not to notice Africa’s poverty – especially when you live in a far flung place like I do where jobs are hard to come by, where, I was once told, families park off their ‘unwanted’. The crippled, the sick, the old, the insane. For years, here, in the Outpost, lived a poor deranged man who had a penchant for ladies nightdresses. I’d often encounter him, roadside, tucking into a piece of fruit that a street vendor had given him, flamboyant in purple negligee. Today I saw a man bedecked in black bin bags, wrapped about his wrist, upon his head, worn as a hat.

The crippled, the sick, the old, the insane.

And no welfare to prop them up.

I’ve lived here all my life. And I still don’t know what to do when a man, a woman, a child, children approach begging. I don’t know what’s the right thing to do. If I ignore an outstretched pitifully, pleading palm I feel brutal and cold and cruel. But if I give, am I feeding an addiction? A friend who works with street children urges people not to give them money for they will use it for glue or drugs, ‘and they are rarely hungry’, she adds, ‘the shop keepers and restaurants frequently feed them’. So what, I ask, what to give? A smile she says, ‘they rarely enjoy positive engagement’. I try to remember that.

Stories of roping the crippled, the sick, the old, the insane into money making schemes by manipulative families and community members abound. For they do draw cash. Years ago, a visitor to Africa, who was resolved to Make Poverty History long before the banded slogan was popularly touted by European politicians, who himself used a wheelchair, was accosted outside a city cinema by a cripple.

‘why should i give you any money?’ he asked the cripple, not unreasonably, ‘see I can’t walk either’, and he gestured to his chair.

The cripple, shuffling along the pavement on padded knees, considered this for a moment, ‘fair enough’, he said, and proffered a few shillings in the direction of the determined do-gooder who waved his money aside but handed him a business card instead.

‘Come and see me here’, he said, indicating the address on the card, ‘we’ll teach you a trade so you can work and earn a living rather than beg for one’.

A few weeks later, the cripple duly arrived at the address and was taught how to tailor, quickly he became adept at using his Singer sewing machine. Months passed and his patron asked him how he was getting on.

‘I enjoy the work’, he said, ‘I like working among others in the workshops’. His patron smiled broadly, benevolently.

‘But I don’t earn nearly as much as I did on the streets’.

Is granting a little dignity with one hand worth it, I wonder, when you take away something else almost as precious (what use is dignity if you’re hungry, cold, can’t educate, feed, clothe your children) with the other?

When we were children and drove up to Town from the farm, parking in the Centre was a perennial nightmare, you’d circle the block endlessly trying to find a spot. Unless, of course, you patronised PegLeg as Dad did. PegLeg moved swiftly between lines of traffic, one leg bent, stunted, useless, a big wooden stick worked as a punt as he vaulted his way quickly, deftly, towards the car when Dad beckoned. Then PegLeg would urge one of the parked cars, with chauffeur dozing at the wheel, to move out and along so that his customer could park. They always obliged. And we always got centre-of-town parking.

PegLeg was paid for his services when you got back to your car and found the contents still intact. He wore a big gold watch. And he was the only street dweller that I’d ever seen who wore a wristwatch at all.

Would he, I thought later, have given up his big stick and his punters for an apprenticeship in a workshop. I don’t think so.

I’ve lived here all my life. And I still don’t know what to do when a man, a woman, a child approach begging. I never know what’s the right thing to do.

The little boy is still tapping urgently on my window. I fish a note from my bag, wind the window down, hand it to him. He thanks me, stuffs the cash into his back pocket and hastily wheels his charge on.

Home

Home now.

 

I’ve been out of the Outpost for seven weeks what with one thing and another.

By the time I get home, I am very happy to be here – wherever you live (even when its far flung and lonely) it’s always delicious to get home – back to Ant, back to the dogs, back to the cat who has not noticed my absence and is utterly indifferent to my return (unlike the dogs who are besides themselves with happy delirium and dash about bringing me presents of leaves and sticks and whining their pleasure and wagging tails so hard they are almost bent in two – as Ant always says, Labradors love their owners more than their wives do – how does he know, ‘lock both in the boot of your car for an hour and see who’s more pleased to see you when you let them out!’. )

 

It took two days to wind our way inland – Mum and me – from salty, sultry, sandy, beachy east back to the wild wayout west. Traffic thinned as we drove. From hectic nose to tail, life in your hands, lines of lorries to places where you can zip along far too fast watching the bush blur past because there’s almost nothing else on the road.

 

 

And I take another two days to unpack and shake the sand from shoes and gather up all the bits and pieces floating at the bottom of my case, errant and important sheets of paperwork that I’ve ignored for seven weeks and now have no excuse not to tend to.

 

It is easier, I observe, to come home to a place that my children did not recently fill with noise and laughter and banter and bickering, it is easier to come back to a place that’s quiet, except for my Ant who I have not seen for two weeks and those glorious animals who I’ve not seen for the best part of two months. They stay very close for now, watching me closely for signs of imminent departure.

 

But for now I’m not going anywhere.

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The rain comes down hard this afternoon. This is our Wet Season. We have only one here in the west: for 7 months of the year we are popodom-crack dry, the sand biscuit coloured and bare, the sky an eternal, omnipresent, predictable, reliablyabsolutleyclearofclouds blue, and for the other five we are buffeted by glorious storms that bustle in full of shouty attitude. They bluster about and throw tantrums with fists full of lightening which they hurl to the earth in bursts of furious energy, and angry growls of thunder and the rain comes tipping down. And the garden suddenly reveals itself and stuff I’ve long forgotten I planted comes to life and the toasty earth is carpeted in green and the trees shiver at the deliciousness that comes with slaked thirst

 

Too Much?

When Amelia was sick, I hung by her hospital bedside.  I lay on the narrow couch in her room and got up every hour, more, to feel her brow, kiss her cheek, stroke her hair from her face, feverish, then cool, then feverish. I did that for four nights and some nights I snatched only an hour or two. Some nights, persuaded I ought to go home to bed, I’d wake at 2am, lie awake and fretful, then slide from the sheets, pull on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, pick up the car keys and my phone and slip quietly out into the sultry darkness to drive to hospital. I drove too fast on empty roads lit only by a sagging moon and would barrel onto the wards to the surprise of night staff who only expected me at breakfast time. I would enter her room and feel such enormous relief to see her peaceful and free of fever and sleeping painlessly.

You unravel a little with not enough sleep and then I could feel my voice rising hysterically as I fretted to the nurses that the meds weren’t doing their thing hastily enough, or when her veins closed up, inflamed, and staff would have to prod for a new passage for the IV and bruises would bloom. I spent too much time, my haggard complexion jaundiced in the light of my cell phone late at night, or in the mean wee hours of morning, as I consulted with Dr Google. I enraged Amelia’s physician in the way histrionic mothers in hospitals can.

Which embarrassed my  husband  who lost patience with me eventually, for my arguments didn’t make sense anymore. ‘You are a great mother’, he said, sternly, ‘but sometimes you are Too Much’.

My eyes welled hot tears behind sunglasses and I tilted my chin defiantly and didn’t say a word.

It has taken days for me to have the head space to go back to this; sometimes you are Too Much.

This is what I do. Mother. It’s what I have done for 25 years. Fashion and nurture and sculpture and grow small people. It has taken precedence over every single other thing in my life. Everything else has had to wait when there has been a maternal crisis to tend to.  And that’s not a good thing – I know that: to forget to eat, to sleep, to clean your teeth whilst you fret and try to fix your child. You can’t do any job well on coffee and nerves.

But, days later, well fed, well rested, caffeine free, I go back to these words and pick them apart.

Had I done other things – had I combined a proper job with Mothering – would I, then, have been granted a healthier perspective? Is my all consuming parenting the result of the fact it is the single significant job I have? Or are all mothers at risk of becoming Too Much when their children are unwell, afraid, unhappy?

Is mothering a discipline we can meter out sensibly, rationally, or is it something more primal?

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Amelia left this morning. This morning, just; we were 25 minutes into the day. We spent our evening on our shared double bed – which I had insisted upon so that I could throw out an arm in my midnight sleepiness and place a palm upon her brow even as she recovered to check for fever  – playing Rummy. She always beats me. I had strapped her foot.  Lectured on which meds to take when during her 13 hour flight to London.  I could hear the rumble of her taxi down the sandy road to the house, see its headlights cast a glow against the windows. And a familiar weight settled in my chest.

Time to go, I said.

Cheerfully she parcelled up chargers and phone and Kindle and stray bits of clothing to bung into a suitcase fit to burst and she hugged me and she told me she loved me and I stood in my pajamas and bare feet in the dark and I waved and I did not cry until I was back inside. Alone and small in that huge double bed with nobody’s brow to check for coolness.

And it is only then that I know I am not Too Much. For when I have to, when I know they are safe, well, happy, my children, I drop my arms from around them, I open my hand and force a wave goodbye.

And I kiss my fingertips and I blow.

And I let go.

 

 

Change

It’s a big, heaving, living, sighing thing out there: that great big sea that comes and goes and whispers and roars and lies calmly flat or rages and roils.

I imagine an enormous silent creature that rises as the tide recedes, its stony spine visible, one that is swallowed by the waters as the water rolls back in again so that I no longer see its bonewhite back as the waves charge up the beach and  ghost craps scuttle sideways in and out of the breakers.

Evolution is a slow thing. But not the movement of the ocean, the pull of tides. It’s on the turn. Every six hours, a new face.

And that makes me think about Change. I think of friends whose lives have changed already this year. Blink of an eye change. I think about friends who know their lives are going to change. I wonder about my own; about the changes that may manifest this year.

Some change is inevitable. Expected. Like the rolling in and out of the sea.  It changes shape, its timetable. But it’s going to happen. Change.

But some change hits you like a bolt from the blue. I know about that kind of change. People say change is good, that it keeps us on our toes, makes us better people, broader thinkers. And it does: the right kind of Change. But not that kind of Change. That kind of change unseats you so you topple and sway and subsequent decisions are born of giddy off-centre thinking and too little sleep.

Whatever its shape, whatever shape it leaves you in, there is apparently no alternative but to put your head down and brave it. I’ve seen friends rise with grace from Terrible Change. Did they, I wonder, stand in the storm and when the wind resolutely blew the wrong way, buffeted them mercilessly, did they learn to adjust their sails.

I think it’s easier said than done. So this evening, as my tide recedes  and the sound of the sea quietens,  I’m thinking about friends trying to manage sudden, ill winds and I’m wishing them a smoother passage.

Describing Words

Amelia says that the waves that roll onto the distant reef at low tide look like a chaotic line of girls doing the cancan; their foamy rolls the snow-white of uplifted petticoats.  The ocean is myriad blues and greens, over the sand it runs the colour of sea glass: the palest jade so that I can see the ripples cast curls of bright sunshine on the sand beneath, with a little depth the colour intensifies so that I know, at low tide, where the perfect swimming spots are: sandy underfoot but deep enough that I might be fully, coolly immersed. And far out to my dart straight horizons – no wonder the earliest explorers imagined the world flat for from here it looks it, as if were i to venture that far I may fall clean off the edge – the water turns the darkest inkiest blues. Nearly black.

At low tide, small sand banks and corals outcrops raise their heads above the water as stepping stones. Sometimes we use them as such, when making our way out to deeper water to swim. When the tide turns, it will do so quickly, one moment the sand island that I see clearly now, large enough to bowl cricket balls, is high and dry and the next swallowed by the incoming sea which will chase quickly up the beach until waves crash and rinse the sand clean. By midnight it will have slunk back, and I will walk, as I did last night, on a beach that glows in the light of a fullfat moon.

The sky is absolutely clear, pale blue deepening to azure when I tip my head back to look directly above me.  No clouds. Not a single one.

It is a huge view, we drink it in from the wide verandah upon which both my daughter and I sit to write. As huge as it is, we have no difficulty finding enough words to describe it.

But Amelia still cannot articulate the pain that felled her directly in front of where I sit now. She is well now. She limps. She is a wordsmith. But she cannot describe the pain that day.

 

Butterflies

The sea is silver at dawn. Unedited,  I upload the photo I take. It’s cast in pewter. A single lean fisherman steps into the frame, his spear hooked across his shoulder. I see him every morning. At the same time. Sometimes he waves.

Mornings are hot and still but the breeze quickens by noon. The Kaskazi is blowing fiercely now.  From north to south.  A flock of brilliant butterflies flits down the reef in front of me. They’re the kites on a 1000 klm journey from above Malindi to tropic exotic cloveandspices Zanzibar. I wave from my beach, willing them on in their noble cause, raising awareness of our beautiful oceans. My heart swells and for the briefest moment I think I may cry.

By mid afternoon the tide is high, a swollen spring, the beach is all eaten up and the sea runs with wild white horses tossing foamy heads. The palm fronds lift and fly as ladies skirts and the fan above my head rotates all on its own. Magically, Mother Nature spinning the blade for there is no power to do it.

Everybody’s back at work. The cottages here are all empty, closed up. Verandahs no longer decked with colourful kikoy cushions, strung with bright beach towels and swim wear, strewn with flipflops and masks. All the guests have gone home. They’ll have opened their cases, smelt the last of the sun and the sea and the salt and they’ll have tipped their damp beach clothes into the washing machine and the floor beneath their feet will be dusted with the sand that spills.

And for a moment they will want to weep.

But, they will tell themselves sternly, there’s always next year. Always another time.

As for me, my work is with me, I flip the lid of my laptop and settle to write, with the vastness of the Indian Ocean roiling at my feet, meters away, its spray settles to my skin so that I can taste the sea on my lips when I lick them. The sea drums and the wind roars and the cicadas hiss in agitation at being buffeted about in tree tops and behind me a bantam sounds a late afternoon crow and despite the cacophony, there is a calm.

I think of Amelia, getting better every day; I think of those big beautiful butterflies dancing their way south and I think of holidays and next times and the sand in my shoes when I finally get home.

Poison

The surf on the reef drums a steady beat, the rhythm of ebbing tides the soundtrack to my night, the wind chimes its instruments in palm fronds that clap gently, applauding an orchestra.

I can see the frothy white lace that trims distant breaking waves, it is luminous in the moonlight. The sea is black. This afternoon I swam between tides, wearing a mask, back and forth in gin clear water, shallow and warm, watching gently waving weeds beneath me, tiny fish dart, clouds of polyps hung as dust motes might in bright sunshine. Tonight I am embraced by calm. This afternoon the sea seemed benign.

I shouldn’t still be here. At the beach. I should be far away back home in the west. And I should have written the words I promised myself I’d write daily days ago. I told myself sternly, there will be no excuses for not putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. Except in Emergencies.

So I have an excuse.

Tuesday evening. Amelia is six hours from leaving home to return to London. One last swim we say and we – she, Hat and I – take to the water. The tide is out, the sea myriad hues of aquamarine and bottle green. We wade knee deep then hunker low and we talk and we laugh and we watch the quiet beach and wonder when we’ll be back. The sun is beginning to tip over a western boundary so that long shadows stripe the white sand like a zebra crossing. It will be cool enough to walk soon and then we will crack open a bottle of champagne, to drink to holidays and family and the new year and then Amelia will leave.

Time to get out girls, I say. We debate the best route to the beach. In the event, it’s the worst. We crocodile walk on our hands towards the path we always take through the coral which can prickle with urchins if we don’t watch our step. We are slow, occasionally resting on our haunches, feet planted on the sand, crouching low in the warmbath water out of a nipping breeze.

And then Amelia says. Ow. And she says it again. Ow, ow. More urgently. Ow, what is that? I think, urchin? I think a toe stubbed on an unseen, underwater rock. I even laugh at her expression, I think she is playing, teasing, I think she is cryinglaughing. I raise her foot from the water to see. A puncture mark on her big toe is bleeding, not profusely but energetically. The blood runs. And the pain is building in intensity. And I think it is none of those things.

Now, now as I sit on my verandah, calm, watching the night, listening to a surf trimmed in lacy white, I cannot remember every detail clearly but I remember my daughter’s face, contorted with confusion and growing agony. We urge her out of the water to the beach. The tide’s turned and I am aware of water hastily rising. But Amelia cannot walk and she cannot swim. She seems disorientated by the pain, her distress is palpable and grows louder. A man on the beach looks anxious. Hat and I try to support her weight through the water but she is taller than both of us and slippery when wet. I can’t, she whispers, I can’t walk. We drag her then, me by her feet, Hat supports her head. But her distress grows.

Shall I get dad? says Hat who is beginning to looked afraid. Yes, I say, get Dad. He is swimming not far away. Hat gesticulates madly. Waves. Wades through water fast and carelessly, mindless of urchins and rocks and coral and whatever it is that Amelia has trodden on.

Amelia’s pain accelerates. She is beside herself now. She screams in agony. Her body arches back. It takes all my strength to hold this tall, wet girl above the water, cradling her, telling her it will be OK, I’m getting help. My mind isn’t clear. I only know there are no snakes in our seas. That’s all I can think. What else can this be. I can’t think. I know it’s bad but I can’t think. I hold her. And it is hard to hold her in this quickening tide. Her body is convulsing with muscle spasms. She is terrified. I tell her over and over, it’ll be ok. She is warm still and that is good, her colour is good and that is good. A guest rushes to the water noticing our distress, he is a doctor as is his wife, he feels her pulse, ‘fast but that’s to be expected’. I see the flicker of concern pass between them. Anthony is with us now. He knows immediately that this is serious. He runs for the car, and brings it as close as he can to the beach. I hold Amelia in the water, ‘what is it mama? why won’t the pain stop mama, what is it mama?’. I don’t know. I can’t answer either question. I feel panic rising. For a single awful second I wonder, will I lose my precious, beautiful daughter in this lovely place, the place that my children call home, that their dad calls home. I know I will hate if forever if I lose my girl here. I push the thought from my head.

Then people are helping us to lift Amelia from the water, four men carry her to the car, writhing and crying in pain. I run up the beach, slowed by sand and panic so that my chest is too tight for air. My tongue has stuck to the roof of my mouth. Fear. I throw a pair of shorts and a shirt over my wet costume, I grab a towel for Amelia and then we are in the car, she, Ant and I, speeding to hospital. Recklessly. Ant weaves through tuktuks and drives vehicles off the road. Our car is big, a menacing roo bar at the front ploughs the way forward.

I hold Amelia tight all the way, all 20 minutes of it. She is hysterical with pain, I beg her to breath, she arches her back and then her head tips forward and her eyes roll up and I shake her and beg, ‘breathe Melie, breathe’. And I repeat as a mantra, ‘it’s ok my baby, it’s ok my baby, it’s ok my baby girl’. And she is not a baby girl, she is a woman of 23 and none of this is OK. I have never been so afraid in my life.

When we get to the hospital she is bundled into a wheelchair, in her bikini, a towel around her waist, a t-shirt damply thrown over her head to preserve some modesty and warmth. We are surrounded by worried faces, a doctor, two, and Amelia begs, continues to beg, ‘make it stop, please, please make the pain stop’.

They try lidocaine shots in her foot, for a brief three minutes there is respite and I see relief flood her face, ‘oh thankyouthankyouthankyou’ and then it’s back, whatever appalling agony it is that is consuming her, it’s back in a matter of brief minutes. Morphine. Pethidine. Nothing works. Finally they haul in the anaesthetist who tries to establish from my daughter, strung with pain but trying to comply, ‘where is the pain? where does the pain stop’. she motions to the top of her foot – the pain is climbing, her thigh is beginning to throb – and they draw a line with a pen at the place where the pain stops and then they puncture the line with shots of nerve blocker and finally, finally there is some relief. She can breathe. I can too.

A stone fish they pronounce. There, in her big toe, the telltale black puncture mark is clearly visible. IV lines are strung up about her bed, cortisone, pain relief, antibiotics flood her system to combat the venom. Stonefish are the most poisonous creatures in the sea. They lie in wait, sluggish and ugly, like some monstrous, mythical, prehistoric species that time has forgotten and only remembers when some poor soul stands on one. At the hint of trouble they raise their dorsal fin as a lethal fan, threaded with 13 spines, like hypodermic needles, and inject their venom deep. They are nicknamed the King of Pain, fishermen have attempted to amputate their own limbs to escape the agony, people have drowned because of the incapacitating pain that has hobbled them.

Amelia would have drowned had Hat and I not been with her to drag her from that evening’s rising tide. It is hard to write those words.

That first night in hospital we work on managing her pain, she cries a bit, she hallucinates alot, she even laughs drunkenly and tells us all she loves us in a sleepy slur. Hat’s face floods with relief when she sees her sister. She laughs and she cries a little bit more.

But the next day a fever builds and the swelling begins and her foot wears a hot red sock of growing infection. By evening the sock is pulled higher and her skin is flushed sunburn red by a rising temperature. A second antibiotic is introduced. Marine injuries can grow dangerous bacteria fast.

She lies in her hospital bed for four nights and I doze fitfully on the couch beside her and track the nurses that come and go and change drugs and then IV lines as her veins become inflamed with medication and venom and fever and her own distress. She is pitted with puncture marks, blue with bruises and all the while her foot swells. Somebody mentions gangrene. Only days before we had laughed at losing a big toe, losing a big toe because she’d stubbed it so badly, ‘you won’t be able to wear flipflops’ jokes her dad and suddenly my single ambition for my daughter is that she will always be able to wear flip flops. Alot of people talk about celllulitis. I talk to specialists at a big city hospital, to understand the best drug regime to contain this mounting infection.

But I don’t consult the internet. I don’t want to know how bad this could have been. How bad it may still become. I focus on Amelia. I watch her nurses like hawks. I photograph her foot and her toe endlessly, scrutinizing the images for signs of change, I gaze at her pale face as she sleeps, her long dark hair fanned out and I cannot think about what might have happened had we not been with her in the water.

And I lie and stare at the nicotine yellow that is cast by the security lights outside the hospital and I feel the knot of tension and worry that has wound itself up from my shoulders and into the base of my skull and I can’t get comfortable so I get up again and I place a palm on her brow and will the infection to subside.

And suddenly, quite suddenly, the heat in her foot dissipates, her colour returns to normal, her complexion no longer bears the sheen of fever. And we are home, back on the beach.

She is a long way off being well. She is weak and sore and she still can’t walk. Her toe is hard and blackening and swollen. The doctors have warned recovery could take weeks. But I can breathe again. Slowly I feel it is safe to tell a story, this story. With this ending. I can dip into the ether – my nosy default position as journalist – to take a peek at how much worse this could have been: she could have been stung on a more vulnerable part of her body – higher up could have implicated more organs, created respiratory problems, cardiac arrest even.

She could have been alone in that rising tide.

It is rising now, as I write, the distant rumble of surf crashes closer. I stand from where I am curled on the verandah in the dark and tiptoe into my room. My daughter is fast asleep in the double bed I have insisted we share for now, so that I can have her close, so that I reach out in the dark and place my palm on her brow and reassure myself that she is cool and that the infection is being held at bay.

So that I can reassure myself that she is here.

Departures

Ben is already swimming when I wake. I can see him – almost on the reef.  A lean shape sharply drawing against a rising sun. I swim out to join him. I always imagine I will surprise my children by suddenly appearing in the sea beside them; they say they hear me coming from meters away, the jangle of an armful of silver bangles. They say the sound is reassuring and alarming in equal measure; as younger children it warned of my approach when they were up to no good. Hat told me she once heard a similar sound at boarding school and thought I had come to get her. It wasn’t me. Just a stranger with a similarly adorned arm.

It is Ben’s last day. This evening he will begin his journey back to London and work. When I started writing this blog he was a 15 year old schoolboy. He’s 25 now, pays rent and taxes. It’s true what they say: no matter how old your children are, you never stop worrying about them. Never stop longing for them to come home. Never, ever stop dreading their going. When I was at boarding school, the term’s start was heralded by a heavy sense of gloom, I’d wake with a tangible pit in my tummy weight.  I am beset with the same palpable sadness today.

So we swim, the two of us, the only people in the ocean, the only ones up even, no evidence of anybody else on the beach. And then we drink tea and have breakfast, a last breakfast, we save Ben the biggest portion of bacon. Lunch will be his favourite fish and chips. Little offerings to make this last day as easy, as memorable, as satisfying as we can. Before we bundle into a cab, take the ferry north to the city, weave our way through chaotic traffic, tuktuks, disorganised road works, pedestrians who dash kamikaze through lines of vehicles, we won’t feel the sticky heat of late afternoon, the aircon will buzz cooly. We won’t talk much. We will watch the world and think deeply.

And we will get to the airport and I will cluck about calling me when he gets there and does he have everything and can I give him money for a drink and Ben will hug me and he will smile.

And I will cry. Because I always do. Whether my kids are 10 or 15 or 25, I never stop worrying about them. Never stop longing for them to come home. Never, ever stop dreading their going.

And I always cry when they do.

364

Resolutions

 

The tide rose high last night. High. So that the necklace of seaweed that strung the beach yesterday is pushed further up the white throat of sand this morning. Amber. The weed is beaded with small seeds that burst with a satisfying pop between fingers when pressed. We spent hours as kids, popping those bubbles.

And the high water has wiped the beach clean of all our footsteps. A new slate. No longer evidence of midnight cricket balls bowled or paths trodden to where the low, low tide tenderly stroked the sand, no weaving routes to the sea to tell meandering tell tales of too much wine drunk. Not even the tiniest tip toe of the ghost craps that rushed hither and thither, scuttling sideways between newly dug homes.

I think of clean pages when I look at the beach. Clean pages flattened with the palm of a hand as I ponder what to write and suck the end of my virtual pen. Clean pages and new leaves.

Over dinner the children (can I still call them that, for my little Hat is taller than I and almost twenty?) ask what was best about 2016 and what of aspirations and resolutions for 2017.

I will write a little every day, I say, that will be my resolution for the New Year I tell them. For it is easy to forget how to craft words unless you do it often: writing is like tennis. Practice improves. And logging the days seems important. Promising myself to pin them to a page in the ether daily means I will observe a discipline that I lose when writing a diary by hand; my 2016 paper journal is illegible towards the end of the y ear, green or blue or black or red biro (whatever it was I could find to hand) scrawls untidily, as if a spider whose lost a leg or two and gained a bottle of gin were has been let loose to scribble her thoughts. A spider who desperately tries to claw the memories of the 8th of the month on the 25th.

So a blog makes for a discipline and helpful legibility so that come this day in 2018 I can cast my eyes and mind back and know whether we kept those resolutions, attained accomplishments we’d promised ourselves we would.

And so I flatten this virtual sheet and type the date, 1st January 2017 and I wonder what the year will bring.

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