“They don’t ask ‘Have you had a good autumn?’ Or ‘Have you had a good spring?'”  I would mutter as I sat at my desk working all through July and August.  “What is this ‘summer’ thing?”

But that was before I had a little boy. That was before early September brought the ritual of  ironing name-tapes into sweat-shirts and getting feet measured for Jack Nano shoes.

This week, as I get the grey trousers down from the loft and hunt in the back of the cupboard for Tupperware,  I am amazed that despite working for four of the past six weeks, they have felt relaxed simply because days haven’t been truncated by 8.55am and 3.30pm deadlines.

Oh the things we have done!

Oh the things we have done! We’ve been to Barbados, been to cricket school, been to three festivals and to the Paralympic Games.

We’ve made bread, made birds of paradise, made new friends and made-up songs,  stories and and jokes (don’t ask).

We’ve paddled in pools, swam in a river and bobbed in the waves of the Caribbean Sea.

We’ve travelled by plane, by tube, by train, by bike, by taxi, by bus and by campervan singing along to Supertramp at the top of our voices.

We’ve laughed, we’ve danced, we’ve sung, we’ve cheered, we’ve Mexican-waved – and we’ve got very, very muddy.

Six glorious weeks

They have been six glorious weeks in which we’ve stretched and flexed and doodled and meandered, got lost and re-united, discovered and re-discovered.

Arch and I have called it “adventuring”.  “Where shall we adventure to today?” we would say as we set off on another school-free day.

Another name for it is “summer.”  I get it now.

And there was me thinking I was giving it to Arch. In fact he was giving it to me.

They started on Friday when I dropped him off at nursery for his last day there. I came home and wept those kind of from-the-belly tears that go on for a long time.

I cried

I only cried a little bit when I saw him in his school uniform for the first time on Monday morning and then a bit more when a friend sent me a photograph and some apposite words about the love being in the letting go.

I cried remembering his first day at nursery, his first night in a cot, his first solids, the time I bagged up his 0 – 3 month baby-gros and put them in the loft.

I cried remembering the two of us being in hospital. Me – battered, bruised, bloated, iron-deficient, utterly exhausted, on a drip, using a catheter, unable to move from the chest down. Arch – exquisite, opening his mouth, like a fish needing food, and searching for my tender, aching breast, not knowing what to do with it when he found it.

I cried remembering that primal urge, as fierce as a tiger.

It never goes.

The grief gets hidden

The grief gets hidden as we go about our day to day business, but these rites of passage, these separations and letting-gos, bring it to the forefront of consciousness.

It won’t get any easier. I will be crying again when Arch leaves primary school, when he leaves secondary school, when he leaves home… He will look like a young man. I will look like a woman in my late 50s.

But I will be that fluid-filled bag of a mum on morphine in hospital wincing with pain as I try yet again to get my red swollen nipple in that tiny toothless mouth.