The Return

As I hear the unmistakable sound of the swifts screaming overhead as they announce their return every spring my heart always lifts. It’s one of my favourite sounds in the world and I am always so glad when they return. The burst across the sky leaving no one in doubt that they are here. Their jubilant call perhaps a collective display of their own happiness at having finally arrived.

I wait for them to return each year and they seem to suddenly just appear one day like magic.

But for them it’s a different story.

Their migration is brutal. They fly between 3,000 and 6,000 miles from sub-Saharan Africa to get back to the UK arriving in late April/early May and always returning to the same place to nest and bring up their young.

They also barely ever stop.

Swifts eat, drink, sleep and even mate on the wing with some staying airborne for up to 10 months without landing. Their only respite is when they are on the nest. No wonder they sound so delighted to be home.

I started a new painting in the last couple of weeks. It’s called The Return and will eventually feature three swifts.

The background is the dawn of a new day. The yellow light rising behind the purple hazed mountains against a sky of pinks and purples. The golden light touching the skin of a woman with her eyes closed and her face turned towards the sky in a moment of relief.

Life is full of hardships and difficulties as well as joys and we often do not see all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. Other people may appear to have everything worked out. Their lives may appear to be going well and they may seem to have everything they want.

But often we don’t see the journey and what has been overcome.

Being a mother is very much like this. No one sees the nights you didn’t sleep, and the worries. Early motherhood certainly looks like the life of a swift as you eat from the kitchen counter without using a plate, and try to hang washing with a screaming baby in a sling close to your chest, willing them to stop just for a moment. Anyone whose baby suffered from colic will know what I mean.

Later it is the constant battle to get two children to school in matching shoes, with the right PE kit and the ingredients for rock cakes that weren’t even mentioned until 9pm the night before. It feels like it will never end. It feels like no one sees what you do. It feels like no one sees you any more.

You are a Mum, and a Wife, and a Daughter and a Carer and everyone else comes first.

But then just as suddenly as it started with that first cry in a hospital many years ago your nest starts to empty and you are left wondering who you even are any more.

That space doesn’t arrive with answers. It just arrives. A house that has gone quiet, hands that don’t quite know what to do with themselves, and a version of you underneath it all that hasn’t been asked about in years.

But it is also then that you finally have some space to rediscover the depths of who you are and who you were always meant to be.

You finally have the time to take your coffee outside, take a deep breath, tilt your face up and feel the sun warming your skin. And while you listen for the sounds of your own self rising, you can watch the swifts dance above you in the sky.

Jewels x