The season of discontent.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that happy all the time?

An old lady asks me this as she overtakes me and Georgia in the street after we’ve dropped Ruby at school. She’s talking about G, who is humming loudly and running her hand over everything we walk past: walls, fences, rusty gates etc. I laugh in agreement. It would.

Georgia is oblivious to the drudgery so widely experienced at this stage in January. The sudden and certain feeling that life has become, for want of a more sophisticated term, a bit of a fucking slog. She couldn’t care less about the still too short days, or the post-Christmas come down, or the cold. Good God, the cold. She starfishes her bare hands and laughs at how red and icy they are, while I squeeze my fingers into gloved palms to alleviate the sensation that they’re about to fall off.

Georgia is fundamentally satisfied with her presence in the world. She wants to experience life on her terms and at her pace, which any other toddler parent will know to be, more often than not, excruciatingly slow. Hers is – as far as I can tell – typical two-year-old behavior, which could be extrapolated to be our primary state of being: somewhere between curious and content. Interestingly, my dad – in his final years – could be described the same way.

In fact, Georgia stopped me mid-stride last week when she pointed up to a tree and said: I see you up there little birdy. The purity of her statement cut through the series of thoughts I was preoccupied with. Such a simple observation born out of natural wonder at her surroundings; the disparity with my pavement pounding forward focused approach: when this, when that. When what, exactly?  

Maybe the contrast between me and Georgia seems particularly stark during this, The Season of Discontent. I’m never sure what I want at this time of year, all I know is that I want to change something.  

A few years ago, I made a decision to stop entertaining the endless avenues for self-improvement thinly veiled as new year’s resolutions. I concluded that ‘improvement’ could hardly be defined as acquiring the fitness to run a half marathon or the commitment to become bilingual anyway, and that my pervading desire to be better somehow was what needed reassessing. And, of course, we gain skills as and when we need them, not typically because it’s January, when the aforementioned adverse conditions are more likely to leave me craving comfort over challenge.

The unintended consequence of not pursuing an endless wish list of new habbits and hobbies, though, has been the turning outward of my gaze. If I can’t be improved on demand, maybe my environment can? I open RightMove and wonder in which part of the country life might be easier. Could nature have a calming impact? Or what about the fantasy of moving to Spain: could warmer weather and siesta culture be the way forward? Writing this, wrapped in a blanket and observing a downpour we’ll soon have to immerse ourselves in during school pick up, I can’t help but feel it genuinely could. 

‘Cos when parenting intensity is turned up and life feels like a lot, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I find myself taking a detour on a rural property search, sensing that we need a new track. Maybe a change is as good as a rest after all, and this isn’t just what they tell the overworked. (Disclaimer: I’m not necessarily the overworked here, although I would be bloody grateful for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.)

Beneath this impulse to enact change, I’m aware that – regardless of any major moves – once we settled into a new routine, life would be more of the same. The privileges and responsibilities of parenting will continue to stretch out ahead of us like a long and winding road that we’ll never reach the end of – that we’re not meant to. The fears and frustrations will remain, alongside the fun. And there is fun, plenty of it. Fun and fatigue.  

My mum, in much needed reassurance, will often tell me that I’m ‘getting there’ – a calming thought I often repeat to myself. But clearly, I don’t really know where there is, and I realise that there isn’t really anywhere to get. I am here. And all that’s required is to be here, instead of hoping to be that human nailing it somewhere over there. In other words, to commit to life as I find it, with all its uncertainty and imperfections.

So in 2025, at 35, I’m still cultivating the capacity to stay instead of strive. To slow down, look around and see the birds (they’re not all pigeons). Happily, while writing, the sun has broken through the clouds, and it turns out we will not get drenched – not today.