A child-free summer is something quite different: the sky is more pink

A summer without the children is something quite different. This different summer began when I showed my children the photographs of the little white house on the Greek island (they didn’t even look at them) and said: ‘You’re coming, aren’t you?’ Silence, laughter. ‘Mum, I really don’t think so, but thanks.’ ‘Mum, enough with this Greece business.’ “Mum, come on, I’ll let you know anyway.” “Mum, I’ve got other plans.” “What are they?” “No idea.” More laughter, more stifled this time, and a sudden change of subject: the dog’s anxiety, global warming, me destroying the planet by eating meat, me destroying the planet simply by existing.

All right, never mind, you’re free to go wherever you like, but you’re also free to stay cooped up in Rome with the air conditioning broken. I was thinking: they’ll give in; at the last minute, at least one of them will say they want to come, and I’ll make a right fuss about the disorganisation and the tickets being too expensive, then I’ll go and pick them up at the port and take them to eat at that wonderful place with the cats and the saganaki and the blue wind.

They did not attend; they preferred a malfunctioning air-conditioning system, scorching tarmac and other matters I neither wish nor can ascertain to saganaki.

Initially, I found it difficult to believe; I continued sending photographs: look where we are, look at this beach, this sky, this cat, this goat, this tree, this sea, feel this wind, come and join us! The only comment that was not entirely bored was my daughter’s, on the first day: ‘It’s incredible, Mum’s arrived in Greece and she’s a different person.’ Hopelessly optimistic, I kept bombarding them with videos and what seemed to me to be irresistible temptations, until they both went off the grid. My son wrote: ‘Guys, we don’t have to be in touch every day.’ No regrets, no remorse. They didn’t even say: ‘Maybe next year.’

I, too, sank beneath the surface (implicitly offended, thinking that someone would notice – but in fact, no one did), and plunged in as if into the Greek sea: at first, a few shivers from the cold water, and then down I went, and that was that – into this first whole summer without children.

There is no one to rouse by shouting through a megaphone, no one whose tangled hair requires untangling, no one suffering from a rash, no one reluctant to visit the white village on the mountain, no one sulking because two weeks with their parents feels like a death sentence, and no one misplacing their identity card an hour before departure.

It was different, and since we can no longer live without making statements of principle, I’ll also say that summers spent amongst adults are less coercive, more honest, and even more difficult. Open to joy as much as to terror. There are no children behind whom to hide one’s whims: the responsibility lies entirely with us. The dawns, the sleepless nights, the boredom, time passing without being punctuated by crystal-clear laughter or searing sulks. The sunset was pinker, because as I watched it I didn’t hear the clamour of teenagers’ thoughts in turmoil, and it didn’t feel as though, with my words, I were hurling bathtubs into the desert. Yet I have even missed this sense of utter futility: fortunately, as soon as we met again in Rome for about thirty-two minutes, my son told me I was smothering him and that he had had enough, because I was insisting on certain vitamins he refuses to take. And next summer? ‘Next summer what, Mum?’ ‘Nothing, nothing, I’m off to throw bathtubs into the desert.’