Kisses in the Sky
Photo Courtesy | Lucy Beckley
BY LUCY BECKLEY
‘Are you still there?’ I say.
The line crackles.
‘Hello? Are you still there?’ I repeat, louder than necessary, to my husband over the phone. Frustration plumes above me like cloud trails.
Our conversation stumbles and stutters as the line falters and then drops.
Over 3,200 miles stretch between us and the degrees of separation widen with the completely different realities that we have each faced that week.
These are the days, they say.
Enjoy them while you can, they say.
You only have eighteen summers with your children, they say.
Enjoy them while you can.
Yet these are the busiest days of my life. And quite frankly, there are times when I really don’t enjoy them at all. My age bracket means I’m now a member of the ‘sandwich generation’—where the perfect storm of responsibilities collide. The make or break time—when a marriage can often reach its ‘wall’ moment. As the fine art and act of balancing caring for others, tending to relationships and sowing the seeds for the future all tangle and merge together.
But as with my whole journey as a parent so far, I find I am yet again, ill-prepared and unsure how to navigate this particular season of mothering, caring for others, attempting to be a friend and generally trying to be a grown-up.
And this is especially true when it comes to finding and spending time with my husband.
As another phone call is cut short by crap reception and exhaustion, I find myself yearning for him. Holding on to the phone in my hand, looking at it and really longing for him. Wanting a quiet moment to ourselves so badly. Just one pocket in time, when time stands still. When our desire can undress each other uninterrupted and when we are neither distracted nor exhausted. When we can return to that first night that we met, drinking local wine and staying up talking until the restaurant closed. Kissing in the dark in the rain underneath the stars. I find myself pinning and longing for the times when we fed our desire for one another with the presence of each other, when our love fizzed and buzzed with excitement and anticipation.
As I hold my phone in my hand, frustrated again by the distance, it shocks me how much I want him and I don’t really know what to do with those feelings. I thought I had suppressed them long ago and their emergence unnerves and unsettles me.
Having spent over a decade caught in perpetual motion—that tantalising temptress that leads you up the welcome path of distraction and on an addictive journey of adventuring. Throw in bringing two up children to the mix and I feel like I’ve left my desires down the back of the sofa with the crinkled crisp packets and forgotten toys.
As this surge of desire surfaces, I am both embarrassed and ashamed that I find myself wanting more. Now that the nappy changing days are over and the heady swirl of sleep deprivation has departed a little, I feel like I am standing at a threshold. One where I can peep my head out a little more and look over to the horizon, beyond the muddled mist of early mothering to lighter, longer days. As I do so, I find that I no longer want to suppress my desires, I no longer want to succumb to the convenience of the many excuses that I have learnt to recite as I’ve shapeshifted into my motherhood. But just like when we used to emerge from a nightclub in the early hours and my make-up had slipped down my cheeks and my clothes were laced with other people’s sweat, I am disorientated and feeling the cold. I seem to have lost my ability to articulate my desires or even know where to look for them. In the harsh light of day, I am out of practice and unsure how to find that person I was before.
Where did the smiling one who jumped on the back of her husband-to-be’s moped to be as they zoomed around London go? Or the confident one who didn’t think twice about how she looked? Or the one who thought nothing of riding a bike around Berlin, fearless and carefree? The one who would tell her husband how much she wanted him in text messages late at night. Can I find them again? Those pieces of me that I seem to have left behind somewhere on my journey to becoming a parent.
Motherhood has an uncanny way of making it so very easy to suppress one’s own desires. And there are many parts of society that aid and abet this conditioning and line of thinking. Whether it takes the form of the polite decline of a piece of cake or simply bearing the invisible load while wearing a smile and remaining silent, at times I feel so very far removed from my own degree of desire that I question whether I am even entitled to a flutter or flicker of desire now that my children are no longer pulling on my legs or hiding behind me.
Yet the more time my husband and I spend apart, the more I want to be by his side. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but motherhood has also made mine grow hungrier. Hungry for that fizzing, flashing spark of connection. Hungry for the touch of one who does not just want a snack but who wants to see me as me, the one that they fell in love with over a decade ago.
My phone buzzes in my hand pulling me back to the present.
I answer and there’s another delay on the line again.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
‘You still there?’ he says.
I smile into the phone, ‘Yes, I’m here’
‘I’m here’ I repeat, louder, more certain.
‘I really want you’ I say, finding the confidence again to articulate what I really want, imagining our kisses crossing and meeting over the cloud trails.
LUCY BECKLEY is a writer, wanderer and wonderer. She writes poetry, essays, fiction and non-fiction. Her writing explores the beauty and joy in the unseen and seemingly ordinary. Originally from London, she's lived and worked in the UK, Germany and Portugal and has recently moved back to the UK to the middle of the Cornish countryside. Her writing and poetry has appeared in a range of independent magazines and books. She is currently working on a novel and her first collection of poetry. Visit www.lucybeckley.com to connect.