I hope my parents know, I wanna go back too.

Back to sleeping together on the lounge room floor in the summertime because we had no aircons in our rooms.

Back to borrowing videos from Blockbuster for a weekend movie night with our weekly allowance of lollies.

Back to stories around the dinner table, sharing about our days, the blessings in our lives.

Even back to Friday nights praying a decade of the rosary and Mass on Sunday mornings.

Back to the day-to-day unfoldings too, like everyone just being in our home together.

I miss this so deeply.

I miss seeing Mum on the rocking chair in the corner of the family room reading her book. I miss seeing her in our yellow kitchen.

I miss watching Dad play outside, mowing the back lawn and cleaning the pool. I miss seeing my siblings play on the trampoline, upside down like gym bars. I miss watching my brothers play Super Mario Kart and Donkey Kong.

I miss riding our bikes together, round and round and round the house. I miss building cubbies and walking over to the hills.

I even miss the thrill of our neighbouring dog Gizmo, who scared the bejeebus out of us, often chasing us up to our front gate, well, until Dad removed the front gate and put it around our back pool.

I miss the pool too, and how eight siblings felt like a constant opportunity for a pool party, and it was.

I could go on. And thank God I can.

And this is the stuff I once tried to forget, because I thought it hurt too much to remember.

So I ate my feelings to numb myself instead.

I thought I couldn’t remember. I thought it was too painful. I didn’t want to miss it.

But here I can breathe, slowly, in the memories, in the feelings and in the remembering that this may be what our children will one day remember too.

And maybe when they’re with their kids, creating a life, they’ll think or write:

‘I hope my parents know, I wanna go back too’.

And in the most beautifully (healthy) evolutionary way, in a way of holding the two things at once; a childhood lived and loved and the co-creation of another, for eternity.

With love, Anne

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Ps. If you resonate, maybe you would like to send this to your parents, your sibling or a friend who you know will understand.

And I wonder if it could invite even more presence with your life, with your children?

What do you miss? Can you feel it? And can you hold it with the life you are leading now?

Pps. I fell asleep at 7:30pm last night with the kids and wrote this when I woke at 4:30. When Grace (our daughter) woke at 6, I read this to her (all the age-appropriate parts) and I inspired myself to have the most beautiful morning together. Reading books, singing songs. And now, as I finish the piece to publish later, Craig (my partner) is out with the kids for a sunset walk/ride/explore and I have extra energy to simultaneously make mashed potato volcanoes… you know, with a pile of mash shaped in the middle of the plate like a volcano, with carrots to shape, broccoli trees, and lava gravy!

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And here, a picture of my Mum and Dad, in our old yellow kitchen. And as I uploaded this, I just noticed/remembered the picture above our sink, the picture of Jesus knocking on a door. Can you see it? Mum used to say it was the door of our hearts and Jesus is always there waiting for us, all we have to do, is open the door.