What to do when it rains

Ah, the summer…

 

From the grim reaches of November, when the days last just long enough to show you how insufferably bleak it is out there before plunging into howling darkness, July waves at you from a sunny distance. You fantasise about the smell of cut grass and warm skin, days spent outside with rosy-cheeked children laughing and splashing into the sun-kissed evenings. You count down the days to the holidays, sustaining yourself through the damp winter with images of the golden summer.

 

Then the summer happens, and it’s not so much ‘golden’ as it is ‘brass-monkey’. June passes and you reassure yourself that July will make up for everything. In the meantime, you have a house full of children to deal with and a living to earn. They’re too young to send out working (although July is a good time to get your chimney cleaned, and my kids are quite skinny) and too old to send to summer camps, so they linger in that limbo where boredom is just a dead battery away.

 

You organise sleepovers, swimming, trips to friends’ houses, all of which require trips in The Mum Taxi and hours away from whatever it is Mum needs to do to make money. You recall fond memories of your own mother shouting at you to get out from under her feet and not to come home until dinner time.

 

During this time the rain is either scowling in big black clouds above you as it threatens to submerge you at any moment, lying in great soggy puddles in the grass where you hoped your children would be frolicking gleefully all summer, or falling from the sky in a variety of speeds and intensities—all of them very, very wet.

 

So you take off your thinking cap and leave it fester in the general air of mouldy dampness that seems to pervade everything, and you give in and let them do what they wanted to do all along anyway: You let them sleep until the afternoon, graze on cereal and biscuits, and plug into whatever device keeps them from bothering you for money, entertainment, and a new family.

 

And you wait for August. Because August will make up for everything.

Aoife O'Carroll is a separated mum living in Co Kerry with her two boys aged 17 and 14, and a girl aged 10.