On settling into the changing rhythm of life
I've might have finally found a place in America where I know how to be the kind of mother I really am
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If you enjoy the way I write about motherhood and parenting, you might like my second memoir, My Wild and Sleepless Nights. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have contacted me about this book - thousands, definitely - to say that it made them feel more seen as a parent than anything else they’ve read. It’s about the year that my youngest child was born, who is now 7, which collided with the time Jimmy, who is now 23, was crashing into adolescence. Motherhood comes into all my books, but this is the most concentrated expression of parenting I’ve written, and I’d love to share it with you - if you do read it, let me know how you find it! I write for many reasons, but a driving reason is to share the feelings we all go through in this strange and diffifult, hard, beautiful life.
It’s almost the end of term in America and I can feel the rhythm of life changing here. The children have complained about their final tests, but they haven’t really been intense and instead the school days have been dotted with the most child-pleasing end-of-term activities: an Oreo tasting competition; a trip to a climbing wall; a party in the school yard where the kids decorate the concrete with coloured chalks; a lot of Pokemon challenges. After-school clubs are also winding down, and Evangeline’s dance classes, normally an intense 11 hours per week, are finished until late August. Instead she and her friend Shaw move together across the few blocks between our houses, playing at some tennis courts near home or walking to Gap on Wisconsin Avenue in the ongoing search for the perfect summer sun dress.
It’s hot all the time, and it reminds me of last August, when we first moved to Washington DC, from Oxfordshire, arriving at the highest point in the summer, when the city baked beneath a shimmering heat which was everywhere, always. There was nowhere to escape this heat, even at night, unless you stood inside an air conditioned room, with artificially chilled air pumping out around you. Standing in a green slice of shade in the park near our house, I’d feel sweat trickling down the insides of my vest, as the children approached me from the ice-cream shop, pink, strawberry-flavoured ice running down the edges of the waffle cones they’d bought seconds earlier.
In America, I was learning, the summer climate is fierce; in summer, heat and humidity melt everything. Since arriving here, I’ve had to learn to alter my relationship with the outside world, and find new ways to be with my children outdoors during the hottest months, which last as long as five months of the year, since it was still very hot in October. It’s almost possible to spend whole days outside in high summer, but there’s an intensity to the heat, and a sweaty, melty quality to the high humidity which is demanding in a way that English summer weather is not. I know the weather has been terrible in England for a while, after that relentlessly wet winter, and that the summer still hasn’t really warmed up, but from a distance, there is a more mellow quality to the weather there that’s very different here.
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And in England, during the summer holidays the children and I would spend a lot of time outdoors, on the Ridgeway or by the riverbed with a picnic, lying spread out on the grass, if we were lucky enough to have long days of sunshine. This would cost nothing, other than the price of a picnic thrown together from the village shop: some rolls, a packet of bright pink ham, a cucumber which no-one but me would eat, a big packet of salted crisps, some Digestives, all for about £11.37.
Last summer, after arriving in DC, I felt agitated and upset by the heat and the question of what to do with the children when it seemed as if the summer was best enjoyed from inside an air conditioned building. Taking the children anywhere seemed to involve a degree of control I wanted to push back against. A trip to the local public pool cost over $50 for all of us and those ice-creams melted the $32 they cost, faster than the children could eat them. An afternoon at the park was impossibly hot, but retreating to cool down in a cafe would cost $28 in sugary drinks. I asked another mother what she did to entertain her children in the heat, and she breezily replied that she took them to the mall, to enjoy the free air-conditioning.
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One of my fears about moving to Washington DC was that I’d no longer know how to mother my children in the way I’d learned in England. This was something I wrote about in The Giant on the Skyline: how will I be a mother, if mothering means creating a meaningful, loving, creative environment, when so much of what I know about mothering, and how to make it feel significant and meaningful, rather than a series of chores to get through, will have changed? Place, and returning to places I know and love, which have some significance and resonance, has played a big part of the way I mother my children. When I lived in Oxford, when Jimmy and Dolly where very small, we spent a lot of time on Port Meadow, which is where my mum took me as a child. Equally, Evangeline, Dash and Lester know big stretches of the Ridgeway, and the riverbank near Lechlade, a place we have returned to again and again, not just because it’s beautiful, but because it also holds memories of time I spent their with Mum and my sister Nell, who are both dead. When I return there, I feel closer to them; the children never really knew my mother, and Nell died when Lester was only 3, but they are vividly alive, to all of us, when we go back, again and again, to the places they loved too. I believe we leave a sense of an imprint of ourselves on the places we love, and if this spiritual osmosis really does take place, then my children can know something of these two women I love so much when we go to the places where we were happy together. It also makes the time I spend in those places with the children feel more significant. The children may not know it, but there is a sense of ritual to that repetition which is deeply significant to me.
I wasn’t sure how I would or could create ritual or meaning as a mother in a completely new city, where I had no bonds, no memories, no EMOTIONS to associate with place.
When I look back at some of the hottest days of last August, when everything was new and strange and so damn hot, I think this was a justified fear. Because I knew, too, that I was looking for something: a place, a feeling, a sensation, which would tether me to my new sense of home. I could not have told you WHAT this thing was, where I could find it, or what it would feel like, exactly. I just knew that taking the kids to the mall, or sitting inside as we burned through the air conditioning, while the children fought over Lego, and the sun beat outside, was not the way I wanted to spend another summer day.
But that was a year ago, and last week, with the children in tow, I found exactly the place, an actual location, I was looking for, which unlocked the feeling I’d been searching for.