In the park at midnight

The women sit lined up along the concrete step, backs against the metal fence. Smoke from our cigarettes drifts, as intermittent as our voices, discussing men, and kids, and who is cold and who mosquito-bitten. The boys do their boy thing, shrieking headfirst and shoeless down the slide, the younger girls try to out-swing each other and then suddenly leap off and mimic us, sitting on the steps on the other side, lost in intense conversation.

Fifteen years between youngest and oldest offspring, seventeen years between youngest and oldest adult until my daughter appears and widens it to twenty-four, closing the gap between oldest offspring and youngest non-offspringed adult to seven years. Seven years between the two oldest offspring: the years between thirteen and twenty that are a gulf. Thirteen is too far apart from the younger ones to want to join in with them, and still needs to be shielded from what we talk about; twenty already carries a small weight of experience and knowledge and pain.

It’s cold sitting still, but no one wants to move, all of us still full of food and wine and shared confidences when the children could be distracted by late-night ice creams, and the talk could move from veiled references to the explicit. Now the thirteen year old shifts irritably when the references are veiled again, and an obscure remark sends a wave of muffled laughter down the line. She thinks she’s on the cusp between child and adult, and has no idea how long and difficult the trek across that cusp will be, or how tricky the terrain is. Our laughter isn’t provoked by the same joyful impulse that the younger girls’ is, their voices suddenly carrying across the playground, hysterical with tiredness and ridiculous punchlines. Ours comes from somewhere darker – an instinctive response to the feeling that if you can’t laugh, if you can’t clutch at the twigs of joy rushing by, life could quite easily drown you, and only happiness and some blind faith in the future can keep you afloat.