Precious pleasures, new and old
The trepidation of reconnecting with the family after years apart soon gives way to something else for Lorna Thornber.
The gang was back together again, albeit with two additions, of the smaller in stature but larger-than-life variety.
It was my first trip back to New Zealand after four years in London and I was looking forward to reliving summer holidays of old and finally meeting the two little people who’d joined the whanau since I’d left.
To be honest, I was also looking forward to doing as grown-up kids tend to do when they’re back under their parents’ roofs, and give in to being treated like an actual kid again.
It had been an exhilarating but exhausting few years and I was happy to relinquish my independence for the time being for the comfort of being taken care of. But it turned out my parents were far too busy for that.
In their new roles as doting grandparents they were barely recognisable: googoo-ing and gagaing on hands and knees, letting 4-year-old Chelsea make up their faces to look like painted ladies after a particularly hard night, doling out ice blocks like they couldn’t care less about the inevitable sugar rush. Which they didn’t. Time spent with the grandchildren was never time enough.
Having known zero kids in London, I had worried about how Chelsea, her 2-year-old brother Brendon and I would get on.
But after a few frenzied ‘‘magic carpet rides’’ (me tugging them across the floorboards on a towel) we were the best of friends.
In my new role as doting aunty, I was soon acting like a big kid/ insane person too. And it felt strangely (insanely?) good. After a few hours I was ready to collapse, finally beginning to fathom the superhuman powers of patience and stamina required to be a fulltime parent.
Despite the 21⁄2 years of life experience I had on my sister, I saw she had been pushed to – and learned to bounce back from – limits I would never reach.
So it’s fair to say I was slightly apprehensive about spending five full days and nights with the lot of them in a small bach in a small Coromandel town. With no getaway vehicle for when times got tough.
The odds of returning to London feeling like I’d actually had a holiday were, I realised, slim to none. I’d had grand designs of exploring the peninsula on day trips but the kids, it soon transpired, were the ones setting the agenda.
Their needs and capricious desires would determine where we could go and when.
We were to be up by 6.30am at the latest (although I often woke to find them trying to wrench open the locked door to my room far earlier) and, while we were allowed out in the mornings, we had to be back by noon for Brendon’s nap.
Unless we wanted him to remind us just how like his precious Transformers he was: his ability to mutate from little boy to little monster in two seconds flat was, to my mind at least, truly terrifying.
Being the new big kid on the block and therefore a novelty, I was often called on by the little kids in the afternoons to assist with some suddenly urgent task: gathering huge clumps of seaweed to make ‘‘sushi’’ for dinner, getting a gang of Barbies dolled up for a party with a princess-wear dress code...
Essentially, I was a kidult by day, my regular thirty-something self in the evenings and had the aches and pains of a 90-year-old by bedtime.
The days seemed much as they had during my own childhood summer holidays: as long as weeks and streaked with moments of pure boredom, wonder and, more unusually for me these days, pure joy. It was chillier and greyer than I remember summers being as a kid but, whether that was because I was looking back through the golden glaze of nostalgia or climate change, I couldn’t tell.
It was too cold for swimming really but the kids insisted and once we were jumping over the waves hand-in-hand we didn’t care. Making the most of that allages playground that is the ocean while we had the chance was the only thing that mattered. In those moments at least.
While I have to confess I found some of the kids’ games monotonous (pretending to use a fake eftpos card to buy fake groceries from a fake supermarket got old pretty fast), I enjoyed most of them because I enjoyed their company.
Happiness, I was reminded, can be found in drawing out on the deck on a sunny afternoon, lying on the hot sand and picking out shapes in the clouds, giggling hysterically when someone releases a loud bout of gas.
It is also walks along the beach with your fellow grown-ups after the kids have gone to bed, and wine-fuelled conversations around the kitchen table about how much has changed in the years since we had all taken on new family roles – and, at the same time, how much remains the same.
It was then that we became our true selves again. Or at least the selves we project to other adults (which I began to think may be the more self-controlled, stressed-out, less spontaneous versions). I was the same old worrier I always had been, my sister the same storyteller and pragmatist, my parents the same generous dispensers of sage advice.
Being someone whose sanity depends on having a decent amount of me time, I went for daily runs along the 4.5 kilometre stretch of fine white sand that is Matarangi Beach, marvelling, after years of strolls alongside the River Thames, at how clean and aquamarine it seemed.
I was in a New Zealand tourism cliche and I really did feel like I was living the dream. How much longer would it be, I wondered, before I decided I couldn’t live in a landlocked metropolis; before time with the family on infrequent holidays and via free-calling apps was no longer enough.
One morning, Mum and I took a walk together to New Chums Beach, me selfishly delighted to have her to myself again.
She told me how much she and dad adored being grandparents; how the children had finally made dad, who grew up in England and had all but his immediate family there, feel as though he had stable roots in New Zealand.
In her ever-intuitive way, she also told me that, should I ever feel the need to leave London, there would always be space for me in the family home, no matter how much changed, which, at that tumultuous time in my life, was exactly what I needed to hear.
When we got back to the bach, the rest of the family was in hysterics, flicking through photos of Chelsea leading dad around the garden on a dog leash.
He was on all fours, panting and skipping along and grinning, and they both had the same cheeky, half-crazed glint in their eyes. A genetic quirk I wondered, or the look of familial love?
My dad died last September, nine months after that holiday, so memories of it are particularly poignant. When I look at those pictures though I can’t help but smile.
It took a special man to let a little girl yank him around on a leash like a long-suffering dog, especially when he suffered from a chronically bad back.
And it’s a special thing to take a holiday with multiple generations of your family, which Lonely Planet is predicting will be a big thing in 2018.
It’s certainly the best form of time travel I know.