Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

I’m curious about something, perhaps you can provide an answer.

Is it a proven theory that the older we get, the less likely we are able to enjoy a lie in? My girls have informed me, thanks to the gram (where else do you do your research in this day and age?) that teenagers are physically in need of sleeping late.

With so many other changes afoot in my house this year, I’ve given in and have left them to their sleep until an hour I deem absolutely necessary to ‘get going’. In any case, it’s the holidays now, the days long and drawn out and lazy and apparently they only get to do this in one era of their lives.

I’ve attempted to embrace this ‘having a lie-in business’ myself now that I’ve got a 9-5er….er, 9-22er, and my weekends are mine.

You know what I mean: that delicious fluttering of eyeslids to the morning light streaming in, acknowledging that dawn has broken, and falling back into the comfort of your pillows and duvet and your dreams because nothing else is important in this moment.

Alas, the call of nature and an adorable little pet hinders me, and it’s 7am on a public holiday now, and I already have a cup of coffee at my side.

Thus so, I embrace that actually, I am now a morning person, and I wonder if you too are in your late 40’s and find yourself in the same situation. I miss a lie -in, I won’t lie. 20 years of sleeping at Anton’s side (not to mention the perils of motherhood) and a lie-in was accidental, never beyond 8am. It turns out it was me who adapted to his routine when we started living together in 2005. How else was I going to enjoy my morning coffee in bed if I didn’t wake up at the same time as him. Our routine was exactly that from the moment he joined me in that tiny Joburg apartment when he returned to South Africa. I was working at a hotel back then, and mostly I worked the late shift, from 2pm until 11. I would tiptoe in to our apartment late, slide next to his sleeping body, and when he woke for his work at 6am, he would bring me coffee in bed and we’d spend time together. Inevitably I would go back to sleep when he left, because I could. That lasted a year, when I changed my career direction, started in on the 7-4 work day (and work week) and we moved towns. Marriage came, and the kids were born, and I continued to receive my coffee in bed when Anton woke up and deemed it a suitable hour (sometimes as early as 5:30) to start the day. Was he a bad sleeper? Perhaps.

The tables turned last year when we realised his stroke. Gone was the occasion where I would be sleeping so deeply due to work fatigue, when I would sense a kiss on my cheek and the whisper of “morning babes. I’ve brought you a coffee”. When he could no longer make his way to the kitchen without making a noise. When he could no longer walk carrying a cup of coffee, without spilling the contents everywhere.

And so began a new routine, because what would be the passage of time without it? Granted those were the days we used to all have something warm to drink and we would converge on my bed- Alex, Beth, Thandi, Anton and me and we would all have 15 minutes together. Never quite taken for granted, but now that it’s gone, I feel its absence.

It was maintained at least in its partial state right up until the day Beth wrote her exams last month. She then left immediately for a holiday in Normandy with friends, and when Alex went off to Paris without me during that period, it gave me a little glimpse of what my life will start to look like in the future. Both girls are back home, but it’s school holidays, and without their Dad waking them up with hot chocolate, they’re now prone to sleeping in, and I head off to work before I’ve seen them. Is this what’s normal for you, my lovely adult friends?

This is what High Summer looks like I guess. A brief moment of respite from the heat of the day as the sun creeps over the horizon. Shuttered rooms to seek out the cool shade during the day. Pregnant heavy dusk where the only movement is the setting sun. Not a breath of air so even the bees are listless and the bats are hiding. The girls and I have been looking forward to summer this year – Alex and Beth want to work in their tans and I want to profit from the late late evenings (I really do love a 10pm sunset). What I didn’t see happening was me starting to work and having to find that routine at a moment when I should be with my girls.

What I didn’t see coming was Beth’s exams and the end of this momentous part of her French education. The occasion where her papa wasn’t around to take photos with for her school dance and drive her to school for that. When he wasn’t around when we opened up her exam results and discovered what a rockstar she is. And how she took trains across the county to spend time with her friends at the beach.

What I didn’t see coming was our 12 year anniversary in France, and how it came and went without Anton at my side. How for the week prior to that anniversary, I was alone at home, and discovered a glimpse of my life in a few years time. Without Anton at my side.

What I didn’t see was me eventually passing my French drivers licence, 12 years to the day I lost the ability to drive insured in France. I did not have Anton cheer me from the sidelines with pride- even though he would have said “it took you long enough. At least we don’t need to sell the extra car now”. And for hours prior to the exam I tossed and turned in bed thinking back to the day I first went out for a driving lesson late November. How awful the lesson was, and how I sent Anton a message on my way home, how we discussed how he was. He was in pain, he was pinned down by the dog, and couldn’t get up to get pain pills, and that I needed to cancel his kiné-therapy session because of the pain. Those messages we had were the last significant WhatsApp’s we shared.

These were all moments that crept up in July. We stuck around Europe for the summer, when perhaps we should have returned to South Africa after all, and not be plagued by heavy stuff.

No. Scratch that line. I lie. This is the summer where we define navigate our new lives. Where we exist in our lives, our downtime, our challenges.

I started working again in June. It’s been 5 weeks “at the coalface” so to speak and I realise now that no perfect job exists. Grateful as I am to have free weekends now, I won’t deny I miss having a free weekday morning for running, or writing, or cleaning, for doctor appointments and coffee dates and necessary meetings. I’m really struggling under the split-shift conditions (and have an entire other essay written up to share at a later date) and I really miss family dinners and evenings of chilling. Occasionally I get to cycle home at 8:30 in time to take Thandi out for a walk and be in a moment with Alex and Beth. Out there it’s nothing but us, and we talk freely without television or phone distractions. We soak up the weather, the golden hour, the oncoming storms. They’re my best moments right now, but they’ll be short lived because the sun is already returning to the southern hemisphere and in 4 weeks time, it won’t be the same.

6 months have also passed already since that fateful misty Sunday morning in January where I saw the cancer hospitals’ phone number flash across my phone screen and I didn’t want to answer it. The truth is though, Anton had been gone for sometime already. January 19th is just an official date. The reality is, it was any number of other dates in the 6 weeks before that. Or the 6 months prior because that glioblastoma took my husband, the father to my children away from me a long time ago. Glioblastoma cancer is a death sentence. I refused to give that airtime in hopes that Anton would be in the 5% of patients with the disease who get to survive it. But I can’t deny it anymore: from the moment last February where I watched him struggle to navigate a tight corner on his bicycle, he was never the same person. GBM took everything so much away from me.

If you scroll through the photos on my phone now, you’ll see the light retuning to my face. The smile, the laugh, the optimism that comes from people around me. It’s the reality: time heals, those people around me heal me. There are other nuisances that plague me, but that’s a story for another day.

I shall bid you farewell for now. This essay has truly been all over the place, definitely lacks the focus of my previous essays this year. I blame the job- and my appalling lack of focus. Please feel free to reach out if I’ve missed something, but also, I welcome news from your side of the world.

But for now, my girls are awake earlier than midday and it’s time for Sunday pancakes and summer fruit.

Cheers to glorious summer days, thundershowers and 6am cups of coffee.

Love and wishes,

Me.