It was a family event: we all lumbered down to the hotel pool so that The Husband could swim with the boys and I could swim…laps. Otherwise known as exercise. Otherwise known as sanity after a day of being in Auckland on my own with them while TH worked a few blocks away.

I prefer to exercise in the morning, but my kids don’t give a shit about what I prefer, so instead we had spent the morning walking to breakfast, then being shuttled up sixty floors in the Sky City Tower, which I could swear was swaying in the breeze as we circled its summit. After that, we hurtled back down to the gift shop where the kids each bought something they’ll never touch again, then the rain began so we headed back to the room for a movie.

When TH arrived back, my eyes told him I needed a break.

As I headed from one end of the pool to the other, I set up a rhythm of paddling, breathing, turning. Once I fell into it, I peeked through my goggles and saw a woman sitting in her hotel-proffered robe and slippers by the window with its view of the early winter darkness. She was on her phone and I couldn’t help but think that this was not the scene she came here to relax to: two boys splashing and shrieking as their dad egged them on and their mother swam away from them, then came back. Swam away, then came back. Always with the coming back.

“I used to be you,” I thought to myself, to her, considering the million ways my travel experience–my life–has changed since bringing the two of theirs into the world.

I used to be the twenty-something girl casting glances at the families on the ferry, likely thinking, “Ugh. That looks miserable,” as tiny legs and arms were wrangled into seats and jackets, as “inside voices” were encouraged, then begged for, as commands gave way to bribery. We used to be the couple at the restaurant who lingered over each course and paired it with wine instead of guzzling down the red while mopping up the youngest’s spilled milk then leaving in a rush because it’s bath time.

“Other countries are different,” The Kid protested the night before our trip, when excitement had predictably given way to anxiety and I was trying to reassure him in the darkness of his and Little Brother’s room at bedtime. “New Zealand is new and different. Australia is old and the same.” The latter clearly being his preference.

“But Australia used to be new and different too,” I told him as LB began to snore beside us, anxiety a missing part of his vocabulary. “Imagine if we had never come, if we had never gotten used to it. New and different can be good. They can become old and the same.”

He considered it as he drifted off to sleep. So did I, as I lay beside him.

We spent the next few days exploring the new and different: riding a bus around an island filled with wineries (and only visiting one; this would NOT have been the score pre-kids). Driving two and a half hours to see hobbit houses, filling the time with a kid-friendly recounting of the tales from Middle Earth, TH and I bouncing back and forth with the details we remembered. Riding lifts up and down. Losing my wallet in that damn gift shop then having it returned to me later by security. Taking the boys to the pool myself, where we found the hot tub full of errant bubbles and proceeded to slather them all over ourselves. Spending rainy afternoons piled on the bed watching Paddington 2 again. And again. Piling back onto the bed as a foursome after brief and semi-disastrous dinners, smashed together, all of it too much and just right at the same time.

And with every other lap in that hotel pool, I would turn and head back toward them: TK’s legs bobbing in the water as he faced me, waiting to grab at me when I passed, his laughter reaching me under the water where mine bounced back in response, bubbling to the surface.

I don’t laugh on my solo lap-swims.

This life and its mundanities–two kids, a house, piles of laundry, dinner ruts, grocery trips, the same paths covered daily on the way to school and work–being the source of such extremes: extremes in mood, in emotion, in geography. This life, smashing us into its corners and crevices until we fill it all, together.

On the way home from the airport, we asked the boys their favourite part of the trip. TK spoke up first: “The hotel.” The place where we woke up each morning, where we returned each night, where we piled up in the bed. Four walls filled with such extremes, but so much sameness. Same being what we always come back to–yet another word for home.