When Everything Falls Apart (And Nature Still Shows Up)
Friday was not a good day.
The night before had been one of those that dismantles you. My eldest Roan, woke screaming from a nightmare, the kind where he couldn't be comforted even coiled tight against me in bed. We lay there together with the light on for a long time before he finally fell back to sleep. Minutes later, it felt, my youngest Albus woke with a flooded nappy. And the coughs and colds that had been circling all week were still very much making their presence felt across every single one of us.
By morning we were all fried.
We were leaving today, which meant packing, which meant five people at varying degrees of illness and sleep deprivation in an increasingly small cottage with an increasingly short collective fuse. I will be honest, we were getting dangerously close to a murder. All parties could have been responsible, but I knew that it was my job to make sure nobody succumbed to the temptation.
So I quite literally threw them out the door.
After a week of chilly but brilliant blue skies, completely at odds with everything the forecast had promised, the grey drizzle had finally arrived. Which was, naturally, yet another injustice Roan was not willing to accept.
I began by setting small goals. Just to the end of the footpath where you can see the castle. Maybe fifty yards more to check for rabbits? No rabbits today. But there were bright yellow gorse flowers to snack on, and both boys did so. Roan never exactly relaxed, he was feeling all the feels and had every right to, but the walk gave him somewhere to put it. Space to move through it rather than detonate inside four walls.
And honestly? That was enough. That was the shift.
A few nights ago, once the day had finally quietened and I was lying with them, I had asked the boys to describe what it felt like in their bodies when the anger came - the kind that ends in limbs flying before brains can intervene.
They both reached for words that described physical pain. Something that builds and builds until the body acts before the mind can catch up.
I've thought about this a lot and I do believe that all emotions are valid, all of them are normal. Feeling the full spectrum of emotions is not a problem to fix, it's part of being human. What we needed to figure out, together as a team, was how to move through the big ones without hurting each other and as comfortably for ourselves that allowed us to experience them but not supress them (ain't life an endless balancing act!).
I make it a point to frame it that way. Not you need to sort this out but we're working on this together so they know they're not alone in it.
Punching pillows has never worked for mine, I've tried. What I keep coming back to, and what this whole week has reinforced, is this: a change of environment. It doesn't always look clean. It often looks like dragging a furious small person out of a door they don't want to go through. But over time, I believe it teaches them something important - to seek the conditions that help them move through hard feelings rather than get stuck inside them.
Nature is extraordinarily good at this because it works on the body directly - the cold air, the open space, the something-to-look-at-that-isn't-each-other. It asks nothing of them and somehow that's exactly what they need. And not only does it work in the moment, it compounds over time.
Once the car was packed we headed through the woods to the Gower Heritage Centre for our last activity before the drive home. As we stepped through the back gate Albus shouted —
"Look Mummy! Jinglebells!"
Bluebells. He meant bluebells.
The joy in that one word was worth the whole morning.
For the rest of the walk he carried my notebook, the small one I've taken to keeping in my pocket as a way of getting my hands off my phone, and declared he would write down everything we saw. He scribbled away earnestly. Mostly his name, which he has recently and very proudly learned to write.
The Gower Heritage Centre was fabulous (a great stop off if you are ever in the area with little ones!) But the storm in Roan was still right at the very surface and when he missed the Easter Bunny encounter that took place just as we were leaving (he had run off with my Mum to look at something else) and Albus walked away with a particularly horrible squidgy unicorn toy in an egg, the storm erupted.
And no wonder of course, exhaustion, illness, the complete unfairness. We rode it as best we could in the car on the way to lunch, lunch itself was difficult to begin with as the prior promised beach and shelling that was to take place after wasn’t happening soon enough. I kept it calm in spite of feeling rotten myself, but I did resort to logic which I know doesn’t land when their brains are in meltdown.
Top Trumps eased the moments that preceded food arriving (we LOVE this game, the boys have various decks and I find they are so great for reading and number recognition as well as learning cool animal facts - our favourite being the shark pack!), and once food arrived that definitely went a ways to helping - are they hungry, are they thirsty, do they need a poo, are they tired, have always been my four starter questions for meltdowns.
And then the beach.
My fierce, stormy boy put his head down and didn't look up for an hour. Head down and focused on a captivating treasure hunt, the cold wind blowing through him, blowing away the tension and stress of the morning and its various disappointments.
I watched it happen in real time.
Not because I'd said the right thing. Not because I'd managed the situation perfectly — I hadn't, I'd resorted to logic at least twice, which never lands when a brain is in meltdown and I know better.
But because the conditions changed. And when the conditions changed, he could.
The three of us fell asleep on the drive from the Gower to Cardiff, where we stopped for tea with my uncle and his family — and we all felt considerably fresher for the cat nap. Waiting outside as my Dad turned the car around, my uncle said quietly, "I've been so taken with the blossom on the trees these past days." He is recovering from a horrendous mountain biking accident — head first over the handlebars, a broken neck, extraordinarily lucky to be here. I stood beside him and admitted it had been taking my breath away too.
If you haven't let it do that for you yet, let it.
Trees are always worth a lingering look — and a hug, if you fancy it. A few years back I curated a walk for Leica through London with the brilliant nature communicator Elle Kaye, and we had the whole group hugging the London Planes in one of the parks. Elle had heard that if you listen closely enough, at the right time of day, you can actually hear the water moving through them. So we all pressed our ears to the bark and listened. It reminded me of listening to a shell — something we'd been doing over lunch that very day, holding the ones we'd collected to our ears, marvelling at whether we'd hear the same sea once we got home.
The drive back passed more easily than I could have hoped. Roan started drawing the Welsh flag, then asked for more, and Grandma spent two hours pulling up flags on her phone while he worked his way through them. Albus drew a little, watched his brother a little, and watched the world pass out of his window. At no point did either of them ask to watch anything.
There was one small moment when Grandma checked Waze for traffic and the boys spotted that every driver had a different avatar — some of them thieves. What followed was forty-five minutes of scanning every passing car for criminals, punctuated by a near-argument over who got to hold the phone, before Grandma held the peace and the giggles took over. Having someone in the back with them was, without question, a gift.
This is what I keep coming back to, on the good days but actually especially on the days like this one, it's not about being the perfect parent. It's not about having the right words or the right strategy ready at the right moment.
It's about understanding what's driving the behaviour - and knowing what conditions help restore it.
Even on the worst days, nature showed up. A gorse flower, a bluebell, a cold wind on a beach full of shells. Small, quiet things that work.
They always work.
If you'd like to understand the conditions that help your child regulate — especially on the hard days — this is where to start:
