We haven’t had much of a summer in the UK this year, so it seems almost cruel that a heat wave has arrived just as the kids are going back to school.
Monday was the first day of the new school year, and Sunday was the first day of the summer holidays that we were able to spend a whole day on the beach. Typical. It was a glorious way to spend the last day of the break, though; swimming, lying in the sun, the children running around with friends we bumped into… We arrived in the morning, meaning to stay for a couple of hours, and ended up going home, our skin rough with sand and salt, as the sun was beginning to drop towards the water and the early evening haze was gathering over the sea in the cooling light. That, to me, is what summer holidays should be all about.
I am ridiculously lucky to live just a three-minute walk from the sea, so I’m hoping that this last minute burst of sunshine will allow me a few writing sessions on the beach or at least some strolls along the sand while my children are at school and I have a bit of peace and quiet in which to enjoy them. Normally I spend most of my summer on the beach, whether with family or friends, or by myself, swimming, reading or writing. So to have had so little of it this year makes me feel cheated.
Secret spaces
The beach is my happy place. I’m a Scorpio, a water sign - the sea is my element. I feel most at peace in the sea, a little speck in something so huge, at the mercy of forces far greater than myself.
I loved swimming at the weekend, but, even though the sun was warming my face, and the sea was gentle rolls of shimmering inky blue that revealed deep emerald green below as my hands disturbed the surface, it wasn’t my favourite swimming experience. The beach was crowded (or as crowded as our little town ever gets), and the sea was busy. It was noisy and it was distracting. It’s hard to immerse yourself in awe and wonder at the vastness of the ocean when you’re trying to avoid being run over by a family who haven’t quite got the hang of steering their inflatable kayak.
Normally, my beach (and yes, I do think of it as my beach) is fairly quiet. I live in a small town, sandwiched in between two cities that are well-known as coastal destinations. Tourists, for the most part, go to those, and they have no reason to find us, tucked away in a halfway part of the coast. My beach feels like a secret, and I’m quite happy to keep it that way. I used to live in one of the big cities, and I’m in no hurry to encourage hoards of visitors to descend here in the way they do there. I like having this beach largely to myself for most of the year.
Beaches are secretive places. So much is liminal space - one moment there is a wide expanse of sand to enjoy, and the next the tide has swallowed the ground that you were comfortably lounging on. It is only ever gifted to you temporarily, before nature takes it back.
My beach always seems to be playing hide and seek. If you walk past at high tide, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it is just a carpet of stones. But when the sea slides back, it reveals miles of golden sand, far more than you would have imagined possible from the 200 feet of stones you saw earlier. There is so much space and life that suddenly becomes visible, but that you know will be hidden again within hours.
When the sea retreats here, it pulls far, far back. At high tide, I can take a few steps into the water and then plunge straight in to swim. At low tide, I could wade through the sea for what seems like an hour and still only be knee-deep. When the sea pulls away, it keeps its own counsel, keeps its secrets to itself. What does it take out there, towards the horizon? When I am able to step from the stones and submerge myself in its murky depths, I look for the sand, hidden below, with my feet. I try to glimpse what the water might have carried away to the edge of the world, what it has brought back. I wonder if I can become a part of it. But only the surface washes over me - what goes on below is not for me to grasp.
The sea keeps its secrets, and I keep a little part of this shore secret inside me.
Summer blues
I wonder what the lack of summer sun has done to our collective mental health. The weather has such a big impact on our moods, even before you get to the 30% of UK adults that experience Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression that is usually triggered by winter. In a country where sunlight, warm weather and long days are in short supply, as are the convivial outdoor gatherings and sense of sociable community that go along with them, a bad summer can throw our whole year off balance.
Constant rain over the school summer holidays has been trying, to say the least. Normally we would make full use of the beach, the parks, the forests and the gorgeous countryside of the South Downs, that are all right on our doorstep, to keep the kids entertained. This summer, though, I’ve had two children, full of pent-up energy and giddy at the sudden thrilling and unnerving removal of their regular routine, rampaging around the house until whichever present adult snaps first, throws up their arms and orders them into the car to go to soft play. It’s been stressful for all concerned. And my children haven’t had the valuable time outdoors and in nature that the summer holiday usually offers.
As the children go back to school and we get back into a routine, I was interested to read some research that says parents are statistically less happy than childless people. Kind of a kick in the teeth, after spending six weeks juggling work to accommodate the little darlings. But maybe it’s not a surprise given that we have to manage this juggle, and all the other demands that come with parenthood - balancing work with the school run, and god forbid one of them should become ill, managing all the admin that comes with school and activities and just keeping these small humans alive. The actual job of parenting - feeding them, entertaining them, soothing them when they’re devastated that you gave them the wrong colour spoon - is hard work, but I don’t think it’s this that hits our happiness hardest. I think it’s that we’re not only doing it in isolation - without that village we all keep hearing is needed to raise a child - but that we’re doing it in the face of active hostility from the society around us.
For mothers in particular, for whom the happiness penalty is strongest, the sense that everything you are doing is wrong is palpable from the moment you conceive. There will always be someone there to tell you that you shouldn’t be working or that you should be working more; that your birth plan is wrong, or that you shouldn’t bother making a birth plan at all; that your approach to feeding, or sleeping or holding is wrong; that basically everything you’re doing is screwing your child up forever. If you want to work, your employer will treat you like you’ve had a lobotomy, but still want you to do all the same work you did before, but in shorter hours. Your colleagues will judge you for not being in the office as much, even if you’re actually working longer hours at home, and society will judge you for leaving your baby for a few hours a day because how dare you exist as an independent human. If you stay home with your baby, society will judge you for not working and for being a parasite on the welfare system and tell you that you really need to learn to exist independently from your baby otherwise you’re smothering them. It’s relentless and exhausting.
But it really does take a village to raise a child. We were never meant to do this alone. For thousands of years, humans raised children in communities, where everyone pitched in to help out. It is only over the last hundred years or so that families have become smaller and more isolated until we now expect people to exist in, at most, one adult pair accompanied by their offspring. At the same time, it’s almost impossible for a couple to exist on one income anymore, so most mothers have to work, and more and more women want to continue their careers after motherhood. But women are still doing around 70% of the domestic work and childcare. So they’re doing more than ever before with less support than ever before.
No wonder they’re not feeling all that chipper.
The good news is that the happiness gap starts to reduce after the children leave home, so perhaps that’s something to look forward to. That’s a pretty bleak concept. But it gives us hope that, now that they’re back to school and we can reclaim some space for ourselves in that liminal space where our mini tidal waves have swept out to do whatever secretive business they get up to at school (do your kids tell you what they get up to all day? I can’t get anything out of mine!), we might be able to reclaim some of our minds as well.
One thing is clear to me - we all need secret spaces of our own, where we can retreat and just be. Alone, quiet, listening to the voice of the universe and the little voice inside ourselves, and in awe of the vastness around us. We need some space where we’re part of something bigger.
We need somewhere that, just for a little while, we can’t be found.
Feel like you climbed in and pulled out all the noisy thoughts mulling around in my head with these words, so much here I’ve been spending alot of time thinking over recently 🧡
I loved reading this Allegra! Just imaging the sea and the beach on my commute to work on the train up to London :) I'm not a parent (hope to be in future) but I get the impression parents have to fight for every inch of spaciousness in their heads. Those times where you can hear yourself breath for a second are so important for everyone, but perhaps even more so for parents.