The weather has been, like my hormones, all over the place recently: our first Australian Christmas Day was cool, grey, and rainy, keeping us in the house rather than at the beach as was promised in our relocation brochure. But for the past week or two we’ve had glorious summer weather, sapphire skies and turquoise water and beaming sun. Which has translated, for me and the boys now that The Husband’s work break is over, into a daily routine that involves sleeping in (or me sleeping beside them while they play Roblox on their iPads), some exercise, and the real start to the day: a trip to the beach.
The only question is which one? Because, I regret to inform those of you whose lives were not upended by grace moving them to a coastline across the world, we are surrounded by them. There’s the one we can walk to and the several more that we could also walk to if we had an hour to spare (my children, apparently, don’t), and there are the ones we haven’t even visited yet, a longer drive away. So we’ve been alternating, usually piling into the car with the floats and towels and sand-digging gear, and unloading upon a stretch of sand of our choosing.
Then: we float.
Aimless bobbing in the water is severely underrated, especially in this time of pandemic and insurrection, of cult followings and impeachments. I’m usually trying not to get my hair wet so as not to upset its washing schedule, now that my other excuse (It’s too COLD!) has been reset/invalidated by frigid winter swims, but this summer I’ve run out of fucks and am just embracing it all: the drippy hair, the sandy car, the salty bodies. The middle-of-the-day showers (theirs and mine). The view of one digging at the shoreline and the other on the boogie board while I bob on my Aldi-provided float metres from them both. Sans phone, sans Twitter, sans anxiety. How weird. How wonderful.
Little Brother is still getting his cold-water chops and often glares at me from the sand when I’m spending too much time at sea, until I return to him and we bundle into a towel together. But The Kid’s aquatic confidence is growing and, armed with his boogie board, he ventures into the depths that tug at my anxiety and pride simultaneously, and fill my heart when he returns to tell me, “I just feel at home in the water.”
That makes two of us.
And then, they request The Mommy Boat, which is less peaceful than my solitary bobbing but not without its pleasures, like when LB says that The Mommy Boat, it may not be as fast as The Daddy Boat but it’s calmer. TK agrees–they’re both loving boats, but The Mommy Boat is, while less fun, more peaceful. I can accept that.
I can also, after some internal battling, accept when TK wraps his arms around my waist and says that my belly feels like jelly, the extra weight around my midsection since we’ve moved here, since I’ve hit forty, now a part of me for them, a soft place to rest. And here I was spending all that time and effort trying to get rid of it? Maybe now I’ll just run for the hell/health of it. I kind of like being their tender place to land.
One day I’m standing waist-deep in a tidal pool so still I can see the curve of the earth in its surface; the next we head down as four to a wind-whipped spray and TH and LB huddle on the shore while TK and I brave the choppy waters together. Storms and stillness can both have their moments.