Same Park, Different Decade

Portaferry. Parked the motorhome in our favourite forrest park up, nursing a beer I probably didn’t need, collecting Game of Thrones door stamps like a tourist in my own life. We stopped at Fiddler’s Green earlier – one of the doors is inside the bar, which is exactly the kind of thing that works better than it sounds. Got the stamp, had a drink, moved on.

Except I haven’t moved on. Not mentally, anyway.

We spent the last few nights parked outside Linda’s house. My ex-wife. Married twelve years, parted nineteen years ago, still friends because three kids don’t leave you much choice. When it came down to it, we made the choice to stay civil and it quietly became something better than that. Not a dramatic reconciliation. Just two people who decided the kids deserved better than a war, and kept making that decision until it stopped feeling like a decision at all.

Kathy and I drove down because Harper (7) and Erin (4) were there. Yasmin’s girls, my eldest daughter’s kids. Her ex dropped them off for a few days with Linda, and we couldn’t get down fast enough. There’s something about a four-year-old that makes a nearly three-hour drive feel entirely reasonable.

Saturday, we took them to the play park in Newcastle, County Down. The one with the Mourne Mountains as a backdrop and an ice cream van that operates with the quiet confidence of a business that knows it has you. And somewhere between following Harper around the hobbit sized assault course and watching Erin declare full-scale war on a puddle she’d done nothing to provoke, it hit me.

Kathy and I have been here before. Not metaphorically. Literally this park. Sixteen years ago, when we first got together, she brought her two young girls here. Gemma and Rebecca, small enough then to think a climbing frame was a serious adventure. I remember standing in almost the same spot, trying to work out what I was doing and whether I was any good at it.

Same park. Different decade. Different children, except they’re not really different. They’re the next chapter of the same story.

McNuggets after. Obviously. Some things are non-negotiable, and a trip to Newcastle with small people ends at McDonald’s. This is not a debate.

Five kids between Kathy and I. Blended, complicated, occasionally chaotic in ways that don’t make the blog very often. You make decisions in the moment, with the information you have, and you hope the maths works out. You don’t get to know for a while. Sometimes you don’t get to know for a long time. You just keep going and trust that showing up consistently counts for something.

Turns out it does, mostly.

They’re all doing alright. Healthy enough, in relationships, living their lives, figuring out their own versions of the same questions we were asking at their age. That’s not luck, or not entirely. That’s years of everyone involved choosing, over and over, to do the slightly harder right thing instead of the easier wrong one. Linda included. Kathy included. Me, on my better days.

The van parked outside Linda’s house this weekend felt completely normal. I’m aware that by some metrics it probably shouldn’t. I’ll take it.

And then today, Portaferry. A bar with a Game of Thrones door on the wall, a stamp in a passport, a quiet spot in the woods, with a beer and too much time to think.

Life doesn’t arrive the way you planned it. It takes detours through play parks and McDonald’s car parks and ex-wives’ streets. It hands you grandchildren you didn’t know you needed and parks you somewhere quiet to process it all.

Eventually you stop trying to steer it and just go along for the ride.

Same park. Different decade. Not bad, all things considered.