A Season Within a Season
School Summer Holidays as a Bereaved Mother
The season within a season begins on social media. Around mid to late July, as I am noticing the season of summer in the lanes around my home - heaviness of seed heads on plants, swallows gathering on telephone lines - my instagram grid begins to turn like leaves in autumn from nature pics, desk pics, coffee pics, flower pics to posts about signing out for the summer, lists of activity ideas people might try with their children, posts about waning mental health under the onslaught of 24 hour child entertaining.
The conversations in newspapers begin to be about entertaining children, cheap family holidays, family related disasters, alternative family holidays. The TV shows begin to be about family holidays also, the dramas about affairs discovered during family holidays or children going missing away from home. And then, in the real, physical world, the tourists begin to arrive in my coastal home.
Down the coast they come, full of energy and light, seeking places of joy and happiness. Like mackerel shoals or tunny fish they arrive in shoals as surely as the days are long. The shops and hotels and pubs and holiday parks all cast their nets and hope for a good big slapping, silver catch.
There is joy to see them back. The town becomes a different version of itself; less serious, less contemplative. This will come back in the autumn, but for now it opens its arms to sunscreen slathered bodies and hazy evenings sitting outside bars and restaurants.
This is a season within a season. It begins when the big top goes up in the field near the top roundabout, the lights of its circus signs starry in endless pink summer dusks. It begins when the music from the Christian camp two fields over drifts across the heady scent of earthy crops ripening.
Nothing brings home to you the otherness of being childless like the summer holidays, the time when children break up from school and the focus of society shifts towards family life.
This is an observation, it is not a complaint. One cannot complain about a changing season. Whether I like it or not I am in the unfortunate few who do not choose childlessness, but I am also in the fortunate few that do choose. I exist in a liminal motherhood in which I am:
infertile
a bereaved mother
a chooser of life without children
I am all these things at once. There are many versions of me.
One version of me raises a glass of bubbly to the camera, glad that I will be having conversations with adults, will be staying up late and lying in my holiday bed with no need to entertain a child, and she is glad of it, glad of the life I exist in.
One version of me aches, literally, aches for my daughter, imagines her at fourteen, probably on one of her last family holidays. I ache for her physical shape to be near my physical shape, though the last time I saw her she was tiny and lay perfectly white and beautiful like a fairytale baby, before I sent her to the morgue. The imagined fourteen year old is hazy, undefined, but her scent and her warm skin seem quite real.
There are other versions of me. They come and go. Some of them need talking down - the version of me who is always on the outside, never fitting in, is fundamentally unwantable - she is slight and vulnerable and needs to be told always that this isn’t the case, that she has a good life, that she is a good person.
I feel I am tuned to the seasons. I build my life and my work and my routine around the change of seasons, but this mini season of school holidays blind sides me every year.
What will I do.
There is nothing to do.
Like any season this one will slip past faster than we think it will.
I will live my small life, enjoy my small days, treating myself with the kindness I deserve, adapting routines to cope with the version of myself that is in evidence that day.
Grief does that to you - baby loss, child loss, infertility - does that to you. It splits your core. There is no kintsugi for this one, it is what it is, and you must live it.
But oh, those raising a glass to the camera days, those setting out on a long walk with no children to facilitate days, those days of selfish book reading and staying in bed with a warm husband, windows open to the breeze, those lived in the moment days, living the experience of life so completely days, those days of focused writing, of giving my whole brain over to simply accumulating knowledge, the joy of learning; those are good days. Everything I have been has brought me to those days.
I am no longer really sad for it, the life that wasn’t. I no longer really think about it in all honesty, but it is difficult not to when this season within a season arrives.
The season will end with the big top being taken down. It will end in bare earth patches and back to school instagram posts.
In the mean time I have bought myself a new swimming costume. I will take some beach days this year and will choose, because all things are choices in one way or another, to distance myself from the families on the beach. I won’t be forced to, there will be other childless people who want to be involved, but I will choose my own small patch of sand, my books, the sea, my own small version of the season. And it will be good.
My nature/landscape memoir The Ghost lake comes out in just three weeks. This week I have been focused on writing newspaper articles related to experiences within it, and also this week I had my first review, it’s in the Geographical magazine and by Olivia Edward. I’m delighted by it. here’s an extract.
‘There are some autobiographical writers who speak of utilising nature’s healing properties to overcome life challenges without fully acknowledging the role of luck in their trajectories. Not infrequently these writers become cultural spokespeople for or representatives of a demographic that they are actually no longer a part of, leaving those who are still grappling with their plights feeling as though it’s a personal failing that they can’t make their way out the same mires.
This is a very different sort of book, a steadfastly honest one that views nature as a refuge rather than a cure. Many should find solace here. And others will simply gain pleasure from the descriptions of the archaeological finds unearthed from Yorkshire’s rich black peaty soils.’
I’m also delighted by these kind words from
(Kim Moore), who’s work I have long been an admirer of.
You can preorder The Ghost lake from anywhere you usually buy books, you can even pre order at your local library. I can’t wait to share the journey with you.
Here’s a link to Kemps Bookshop in Malton, North Yorkshire, where I’ll be doing an author event in August, you can pre order the book and they’ll send it to you. Support indie bookshops where you can!
As well as some in person events, I’ll be having a small online launch exclusively for my paid substack subscribers. But more about that next week.
Until then
x
Wow. Thank you, Wendy. I haven't traversed these same roads, but have dear friends who have shared your experiences. I've been an observer, a hand-holder, and a listener, and I always feel privileged to hear the stories and the wisdom. It's not a privilege that feels good, because none of it feels good, but it is a privilege in that we all have a part to play in this drama, where so often it "is what it is." I so appreciate your perspective.
I read this first thing this morning and have thought about it all day. Thank you Wendy, it's deeply moving.