Holidaying with two Baby Boomers and two peri-menopausal women in a 400sq ft flat

How we made family time work

I’m not sure when the shift happened for my sister and I, when it came to our parents, upon realising that they were getting older in a way that couldn’t be brushed over.

Perhaps it was the soft fissure of grey hair steadily growing around my mother’s crown, one too many retellings of the same story within a short space of time. Maybe it was the physical stuff. The realisation that a short hike my sister, father and I had taken between two villages in Cinqueterra in Italy, was no longer an option. Or my mother’s previously inexhaustible battery which fuelled her to cook big dinners, pop in to see her friends, garden for hours was starting to get…exhausted.

It might have been all of it, but there was a shift sometime last year, underpinned by my father turning 78 and talk of his 80th when my sister and I said to each other I can’t BELIEVE Dad is nearly 80. And hidden in the middle of that shock was a reality that neither of us wanted to confront.

I’m not sure what we expected but my father’s 80 is not what we thought 80 looked like, in the same way that 45 isn’t what I thought it would be for me, and my sister’s 50th looks nothing like we thought 50 would look like for her. It’s not to do with aesthetics, not really, but more the overall picture that is in front of us.