Take It to the Sea
There’s nothing like being under the double cosh of a sick toddler (not Covid) and a period of nursery-imposed isolation (Covid) to set your priorities straight.
Virigina Woolf wrote about women needing a room of their own and £500 a year; I’d like to add an addendum - childcare. Without it, nothing can happen.
At times like this, I strip things right back. Clean clothes, fresh nappies and regular meals. Anything else is a bonus. I don’t read or write, and little paid work or house chores get done. I’m not really okay with it but I’m better than I used to be at maintaining perspective. Nothing new for now. Nothing else for now.
Actually, this will be my last letter for a while. I’m taking some time off in August. It’s been over a year since I launched myself into space as a freelance writer and oversharing essayist. People will do anything to discourage you but I can say that I have no regrets - and if you know me by now, you’ll understand that is no small statement. I’ve made money (not much, but enough), stayed well and witnessed everyone grow a year older. In this life, that all stands for quite a bit.
I’ve written over 20 of these essays now. At first, I viewed them rather cynically as an exercise in marketing my writing skills - and they did, in fact, help me win writing clients. But something more fundamental was taking place. In writing to you, I have been writing to myself.
The further I travel from my old life and the farther out to sea I go, the more unlikely it is I can ever get back. But it’s also becoming easier to be comfortable with that. I’m feeling better about not going back and more assured about writing myself into existence. James Baldwin insists:
“One writes out of one thing only - one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing with these dear letters to you. It’s taken me over a year to accept that that’s what I should have been doing all along.
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Last weekend, we went paddling at Leasowe Bay, a fabulous length of sandy beach, part of the Wirral Coastal Park. (How has Wirral remained such a hidden paradise? If this was the south coast, there’d be condos and CEOs on jetskis at every turn.)
My oldest son is four and about to start school, but still innocent enough to drop his trousers and run towards the sea at a moment’s notice. I had to wrestle him back from the water to change him into his swim clothes. I’ve never put swimming shorts on an octopus before, but I reckon I could. I eventually forced the lycra suit over his muscular, slippery limbs that wouldn’t stay still. When I released him, he shot into the water like a greyhound from a trap, and I wasn’t far behind.
The water was warm. I was amazed. The sun was high and hot, the air foamed with the onshore breeze and the waves chopped around my legs. My husband held the toddler, kicking furiously like a tiny Canute at the water’s edge. My older son and I waded a little further out; the big boy’s privilege. We are often in cahoots, this boy and I. Growing up, my father and I would get lost in the green together, in the mountains and the fields of where we lived. Now I lead my own boy into his wildness.
There in the water, with the sun bleeding down into the horizon and only miles of sand and grass in the other direction, I took it all to the sea. The fear, the self-consciousness, the doubt, the pettiness. The insecurity. The envy. The turbulence, the loss and the fragility. All of the impulses that form the undercurrents of my life - I gave them all to the sea to carry away on a roar of salt air and crashing water.
Sometimes we are the current, pushing and pulling and directing the flow of our lives. Other times, the sands move from under our feet and we’re forced to move too. This year, I’ve experienced both.
Not everyone is fortunate to live near the sea but if you can make it to the coast this summer, even just for a day, then do. The wildness of your nature can’t be contained in smart parks and artisan coffee shops. Let the ancient tides and counter tides eddy and flow within you and without, and see yourself at real scale.