He runs up to me, his hand loosely grasping mine. I go to squeeze it and he’s gone again, dashing away from the oncoming waves licking at his red and blue sandals.

I stand firm, the water pulling on my feet, flowing back out to the ocean. He darts around me, unpredictable, coming and going, coming and going. The waves can’t be predicted either – sometimes they stop feet from me, sometimes they wash over my knees, pulling me out to the endless water.

A few minutes earlier, I was out in the thick of the waves. They swelled and faded, sometimes huge and sometimes mild. At times, I bobbed along, allowing them bring me up and back down, as rough as they were. Other times, I tried to ride them, diving in at the last minute. They smashed me into the sand, knocking the breath out of me. I scrambled to my feet, my hair covered in sand like a disheveled mermaid, my hands sore from bracing against shells and stones. And yet I went back out again. And again.

The waves have a wildness I want to embrace, to rediscover in myself. I, who always wants to control, to predict, to know, have that wildness there still, deep within me. In part, I never let it go – being a weird kid and outcast, then a quirky adult with the inability to change to please others meant that I was always a bit out there anyway. But as a result, I clamped down harder, tried more than ever to make sense of the world by shaping it to my own design.

That all changed when I had kids. Like the ocean, they are impossible to fully control, doing as is their nature. They have their own rhythm, their own flow, their own ways of being in the world. Fighting them is like fighting the tides – tiring and pointless.

So rather than fighting them, we adjust, adapt, work with who our children are rather than against them. Sometimes it still feels like I’ve gotten smashed into the sand face-first. But when I can reach inside myself, find my own wildness, we can be carried along in harmony. We can hit the shore together, then collect ourselves and wash back out. Returning to each other again and again and again, just as the waves do.