By Georgina Spiller
As we glide towards Christmas has anyone stopped to assimilate what’s happened?
The Indian summer won’t last forever. And I can already see the chocolate in the aisles at the Co-op because as usual time is a conveyor belt that I just cannot reach.
Did your September take a piece of you with it?
Did your first child start full time school? Or your last?
Did your heart fall out of your coat pocket and roll across the playground unnoticed by your partner, the teacher, other mums and your newly uniformed child?
Were you the silent witness to it rolling away past the climbing frame into the hedge?
Did you walk home in a confusion of pride and hurt?
Did you feel better the next day but knew you were a little bit different than the day before?
Did you get asked a million times just what you’d do all day now?
Did you feel ashamed or excited or fatigued or deserving? Did you brazen it out with a cocky comeback?
Were you even bothered?
Did you feel relief so huge you weren’t sure what to do with the lightness left where your shoulders once were?
Did it mean childcare costs slashed and you skipped to work feeling life really is about to begin? A life where everything you earn isn’t going to the nursery up the road.
They say a summer grows a child up.
Well, it’s the same for us.
We got through it.
Another summer survived.
Another year done.
Which breaks our hearts. But there it is.
