Why do I feel like this?

[susannahmoodie]

I posted this in chat but got no responses so thought I'd try here instead:

Last year dh and I went to France with our 2 ds who were then aged 9 m and 3.5. It was a eurocamp holiday, very similar to many of the holidays I went on with my parents and siblings when I was a child. I had a very happy childhood (never really appreciated how happy until I joined mn) and my parents are still alive and well, live nearby and we see them all the time. And yet for the first few days of that holiday I just cried and cried. It was like an aching sense of nostalgia for those childhood holidays combined with a disbelief and happiness that we were now on holiday with our own family. A bit like that book Once There Were Giants iyswim.

Then this year we went back, same place, and it happened again!! Uncontrollably teary for 2 days. Except this time I wasn't just nostalgic for my childhood but for the previous year and it seemed to highlight how much our boys had grown up in a year.

It was such a strange feeling and unsettled me a bit. Dh thought I was losing the plot! So I'm just trying to unpick it now.

We've had loads of other holidays and this hasn't happened before...just this place in France. Why does this happen to me, can anyone explain?? Anyone else have this??

I haven't got a scientific theory or anything, but perhaps it was a two-fold thing - firstly, that you were following in your parents' footsteps, which made you realise that you are a parent yourself now and the time to rely on your own parents is waning, that time is passing and you will never be an innocent child without responsibilities again; secondly, that this passing of time means that your children will one day grow up (as you have!) and perhaps bring their own children here - which is sweet, but also reminds you that their childhoods are so short, relatively speaking.

A stab in the dark - hope it helps?!

I agree about the whole 'time passing' thing, which i often experience as a kind of melancholy nostalgia for the present, feeling sad during ostensibly happy moments. There's a podcast about parenting that has the ingenious title 'The Longest Shortest Time' -- that title neatly encapsulates this phenomenon.

Yes I think that is probably right. I've heard the expression 'the days are long but the years are short' on here which I think probably sums it up too.

I've actually done this! In a hotel that we used to go to with my grandparents and parents we visited as a group last year. I was so teary and sobbed when I had to leave. I was pregnant so put it down to hormones but the same happened this year. I just see it as such a happy and comfortable/comforting place that has become a background for the snapshot of many happy memories. I hope to make more there.

Memories are incredibly powerful especially ones that have lain dormant ( good and bad) for years.

Did you see 'Inside Out'? It has a pretty great visual way of representing this -- memories that were once happy become touched by sadness and change from golden yellow to a kind of gloomy blue, although their actual content remains exactly the same.