14/05/2026
We have taken a few days away together, the six of us, before our Luke spreads his wings towards adventure. He asks me to rub sunscreen on his back. My breath catches as I take in his broad back, it is the back of a man. It has been many years since I have had to do anything like this for him. Years that seem to have evaporated somewhere into my past, somewhere into the piecing together of the woman I am now. I try to reach for them in my memory but so much of it is hazy, almost like it was someone else's memories. Maybe it was, I was a different woman then.
On the beach with he sound of him playing with his younger siblings behind me, I watch as a beautiful pregnant woman stands at the waters edge as her partner takes pictures of her, she cradles her bump, I wonder can she feel her baby move under her hand. I remember how the magic of that never got old. I can see the love already shining through her like the glistening of the sun off the break of the waves that roll on and on at her feet. As I look away from her to the right there is a family, the Dad is making his young children squeal in delight in a way that makes everyone that can hear them smile. He is lifting up their sunbeds and moving them around in a way that I bet the children feel like they are on a roller coaster or even spaceship. Their mother watches on quietly, smiling, I imagine the warmth of what she is watching almost overwhelming her. I observe these people and I wonder do they have any concept of how quickly the time will pass until these babies and toddlers are adults heading off on their first adventure. I want to go and tell them but, I know that this is an experience for which no words are sufficient. There is nothing I can say thay could prepare them.
I also want to tell them to trust when the road gets bumpy. This is a man, who, for most of his childhood, adolescence and earliest adulthood lived with crippling anxiety and panic attacks. I often wondered how he would ever manage to survive without me constantly near by and yet here he is, surviving and thriving. And here I am wondering if I will ever manage to survive without him near by, if any of us will
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