Preparing for Goodbye
- June 14, 2018
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
We didn’t come here for ever.
We didn’t mean to stay much longer than a year. We never intended to make the Bahamas our home; we didn’t mean to fall in love with it, and we could never have predicted that from the first moment we got that white white coral sand in our shoes it would feel like it had always been there.
But that was what happened.
Two years ago next month we arrived on this island with our belongings in 10 boxes and – as with so many leaps of faith in life –...
These are the days. The days of young motherhood.
They are days ruled by fatigue; when “tired” is a sliding scale rather than an occasional visitor. Days we forget to look in the mirror before we leave the house and can’t remember where we put the car keys or the iphone or our sunglasses or our sanity.
These are days of uneaten peanut butter sandwiches and rejected veggie pasta bake and of the guilty 6pm dash to the drive-thru for chicken nuggets because you can’t remember the last time they ate Actual Food.
These are days of falling asleep on the couch watching...
Dear fellow thirtysomething mum,
I see you in the supermarket, I see you at the playground. I see you at the school drop-off, I see you on the train and in the kid-friendly restaurants. Sometimes you see me too, and we exchange a little smile, an eye-roll, an “I get it” moment. More often you don’t see me – you are chasing your toddler down the aisles, watching your pre-schooler like a hawk as she climbs higher than you’d like, admonishing your kid for pinching her brother, reaching for a wet wipe, mopping up a spilled drink.
A few days ago I was...
I never imagined the sheer size of the feelings motherhood would bring on. From the day the test showed that miraculous plus sign, the feelings have been enormous. Excitement, exhaustion, trepidation, uncertainty, fear, relief, joy – and that was before I even met my baby. And then the love – oh, the love, the love! The love that blindsides and astonishes and fills you up and gives you the energy to keep going, the patience to pull through another sleepless night, another tantrum, another suppertime hour that seems never ending. The love is there, always.
Thank goodness.
Because there’s another big feeling we...
