Time, excrement and Taylor Swift with Luana Holloway

“More than a decade in, fat with all the versions of myself and my kids that I have swallowed” 

Luana Holloway, a well seasoned mother, indulged us with the scenes and learnings from toddlers to tweens whilst she sat pretty on what can only be described as a “GOAT mum” getaway. A trip with her daughters to Sydney to see Taylor Swift, dreams came true, words were written.. 

Here they are.. 

Luana: When Mel & Cel asked me to contribute to their blog I knew I would have time to write because I was about to go away for a few days to take my daughters to see Taylor Swift in Sydney. In their email the very first writing prompt was Raising toddlers Vs tweens, highs and lows. There may be no greater summation of the differences between having a toddler and a tween than taking time away from your career to go and see a concert and knowing that you will have time to write (bringing a toddler anywhere leaves you no time to even think). 

The trick mirror of Motherhood is that when things are hard we soothe ourselves with a lullaby that everything will soon get easier. A balm for imposter syndrome, overwhelm, fatigue, all while being well aware that there is probably little ease in a role so important. I will double down on that and flip the narrative on its head. It doesn’t ever get easier, it gets different, it may even get harder. However, you may be lucky enough to feel more capable for the demands of older children. This is where the email finds me. 

When I had two toddlers I wrote an essay for a magazine in which I used a line to summarise my feelings about the dichotomy of mine and my husbands roles 

“Me on the floor, you out the door” This simple sentence contains so much - It’s dramatic and makes me seem desperate and unhinged, my husband flighty. At the time it felt like the most honest thing I had ever written - 8 words that tied our present situation in a neat bow. Reading it makes me laugh now but at the time it made me cry. Nuance and perspective is hard won in the throws of new life, but from a distance I can see that I didn’t want to run out the door nor chain my husband to the couch, I wanted us to tuck a daughter each under our arms and fling the doors open together. I wanted to be spontaneous. I wanted to get on a plane and go see Taylor Swift. These kinds of experiences have since coloured so much of our time as a family, but who can foresee that when they are elbows deep in domesticity?

The temptation to future trip and dream my babies’ many incarnations into existence is my way of reassuring myself that they will be mine forever and that the promise of wonder is infinite. Any longing for an easier stage is not a longing for less work or a kind of bypass. What I am yearning for is a deep sense of capability, a time when I know that no matter what happens I have the capacity to be exactly what they need. As someone who has built much of their identity around thoughts and ideas, being able to communicate fully and build complex emotional binds with my daughters is far easier to me than trying to carry a one and three year old through the supermarket with explosive poo running down my sleeve and vomit in my hair. I don’t miss being so intimate with excrement, I do miss their little nappy bums though. 

So while I do not long for the days of simplicity and squishiness, I know that I milked them dry - literally and figuratively, and that they are the scaffolding on which my present is built. Most of those days I spent falling so deeply in love, but some days lasted forever and I was so bored yet busy that I felt like there were huge parts of my identity atrophying. I understand now that I needed that too, the part of me that wanted to race ahead and peek into the future to hear my daughter's first sentence, to watch her catch her first wave, to listen to her first joke needed to be rerouted to the present. I’m certain that this unravelling is why I love my current stage so much, more than a decade in, fat with all the versions of myself and my kids that I have swallowed, two feet firmly in the present and completely surrendered to it all.

You can read more of Luana’s breathtaking words on life and motherhood @luana.holloway

and in Issue 2 of Howl Magazine.