Esther McCarthy: You only get 18 summers with your kids — cherish them

Esther McCarthy. Picture: Emily Quinn

You only get 18 summers with your kids, you know.

I scoffed when I first heard this. We were on a beach on our holidays in Lanzarote and our little boys were nine, six, and three. They were playing away in the sand together, and an older woman nodded over at them, and leaned into me.

“Enjoy them while you can,” she urged, clutching my arm.

“They’ll be grown in a blink, A BLINK,” she cautioned.

I smiled at her. “Oh sure, it goes so fast, I know,” I said, probably a little patronisingly.

She darted a look at me like I was a moron in a sundress, who really, really, didn’t know.

“Eighteen summers is all you get, and that’s if you’re lucky,” like a gypsy’s curse, she said it.

“Why don’t you enjoy them,” I muttered darkly three minutes later when the smallie was bawling over a sore bumbum, and the older two were pelting each other with pointy shells, and I never got to finish my book.

I looked around for her, wondering if I could use her nostalgia to trick her into babysitting for an hour, but she was gone. Off for a child-free nap, probably, I guessed, enviously.

Eighteen years seemed like eons back then. But now, incredibly, inconceivably, my children have time warped into a 15-, a 12-, and a nine-year-old. Older, bolder, cuter, but they’re still not above lobbing a stabby-looking stone at each other, given the opportunity.

Looking back to that summer, it was probably the ideal age dynamic, the perfect holiday. I just didn’t know it. Books read: zero. Seconds I would change about that foreign fortnight: also zero.

We were in the sweet spot. No nappies, no phones, no schedules, no worries. They loved being with each other, revelled in having mam and dad’s undivided attention — they wanted, nay demanded — hugs in public. 

They still believed mammy had magic kisses. The biggest decision was where to eat dinner, and what flavour ice-cream to choose after.

The boys would spend hours just burying each other in the sand, guffawing when they finally got to put the hat on the submerged one and pretending they had disappeared. 

“Where’s he gone?” we’d wonder, amazed, looking under the towels and into buckets. Playing Lego and tractors and tag and drawing in restaurants with the crappy crayons, with their little tongues peeking out the side of their mouths.

That was the summer of blowing bubbles and cheating at Uno and playing musical statues in the little kitchenette of our apartment.

The age gap was exquisite. They’d all watch the same cartoons (Teen Titans, Spiderman, The Simpsons) back then, and listen to the same bedtime stories, all of us squashed in together, little bodies still hot from the day, and glazed with aftersun, sand in the bed, reading about Tiddler, the little fish with the big imagination.

This week, son number two finished primary school. “I’ll never wear this uniform again,” he said with a satisfied little sigh, as I hummed the ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ and tried not to ugly cry at the school gate.

The 15-year-old has just landed back from 10 days away without us, and it’s hitting me, hard and unexpected, that he probably won’t want to come away on holidays with us soon. 

Grand this year, because we’re not leaving the country, joke’s on him, but all of a sudden, the gypsy curse is inching towards fruition.

I’m letting myself have a little nostalgic wallow when it dawns on me. Never mind them, how many summers do mam and dad have left?

A quick Google reveals the average life expectancy is 84 for an Irish woman. Now, given that I sit on my arse for a large portion of my day, have a penchant for dining and drinking like a debauched Roman emperor, and regularly engage in life-shortening bouts of random foolishness, I am very likely to not make the average.

The heavy homemade wooden clothes dryer pulley yoke fell on my head the other day, and I had to lie down on the floor and have a little faint, then when I tried to get up, I pulled a full bottle of water in an aluminum bottle down on precisely the same bit of my sore skull and I fell down again. It was a farce, and I have the bump to prove it.

Men in Ireland get 80.4 years, according to the Department of Health, so between us, if my husband and I don’t kill ourselves in a tragic clothes horse related incident, best case scenario, we have 33 summers left. Full stop, finito, game over. 

Some, we know, departed without their fair share of summers. Maybe I should book a break this year after all, we’ve got to make every one count. If I’m not careful, I’ll blink again, they’ll be 30, 27, and 24, and I’ll be wearing a moomoo, leaning on my zimmerframe, and bawling over my sore bumbum.

I’ll dedicate my last days to cursing young mothers with the knowledge you only get 18 summers. If you’re really, really lucky. Cherish them.