So near, so far

SUMMER holidays are an opportunity to take time to just stop, to unfurl a different self. Notice someone again. Maybe the person closest to you.

BELLY to belly, or back to back? An Irish reader alerted me to this lovely, pithy encapsulation of an enduring relationship when describing a venerable woman of a certain age at her husband's funeral.

When she buried him, a labouring man, after 60 years of marriage, she said, "Son, we were more times belly to belly than back to back."

As for myself? Too often now it's neither, and that cuts through me like a piece of ragged tin. Relationships aren't meant to be like this. Another reader, in a missive of despair, pinpointed a peculiarly modern aloneness:

"Our children are happy, healthy and involved in various extracurricular activities; my wife and I are on school boards, church groups and have a good social network. We've never been busier. Yet at times I don't think I can remember ever being so lonely. I miss my wife. Somehow along the highway of life we changed cars. We used to be in the same one, windows down, singing songs from the radio. Now we're travelling in the same direction but in different cars, different lanes."

My own relationship feels sometimes, bizarrely, achingly, as if there's a banker's screen of thickened glass between us; I can't reach my husband enough anymore, touch him, be still with him, commune meaningfully. We're just too busy. Encumbered, exhaustingly. By everything. "Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately on one another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex," D.H. Lawrence wrote, yet in this great tumult of kids and socialising, emailing and instagramming and tweeting, tidying and washing and shopping and working it feels as if the two of us are rarely still enough, close enough, to be in that car of old anymore, madly singing songs together at the top of our voices. Every weekend's an intricate ballet of child-ferrying to sporting fixtures and playdates and parties yet we're rarely doing anything side by side now, with the lovely looseness of the past; too busy making time for everyone except each other. We're rarely even in the same bed anymore. If there's not a squirmy little body already in it by the time the Chap's ready for sleep, he's nodding off in front of the telly because he's so exhausted from his gruelling days at work. The joys of modern life.

My brother and I have been doing a bit of car travel recently, moving our grandmother into a nursing home. It's got us reminiscing about the trips we endlessly took as kids, lying in the back of the station wagon among a jumble of pillows, staring out at the moon following us. It's my brother's favourite childhood memory. There was a little flinch at that, because my own kids so rarely experience just being together as a family. We're too unwieldy as a gaggle of six, too crazy-busy with so many different ages and demands rubbing up against each other. So there's a splintering. Every weekend. We're too rushed, too busy making an effort doing everything that everyone else is doing. We rarely have the courage to do nothing, without screens; seem almost afraid of it. There's something wrong with this.

Summer holidays are coming. That great pause of replenishment and release. It's an opportunity to take time to just stop, to unfurl a different self. Notice someone again. Maybe the person closest to you. Talk. Be still with each other, perhaps even lie belly to belly. It's a time to remember the repairing shock of kindness, which could be something as simple as a goodnight kiss after endless nights of not, a morning cup of tea, a sleep in. Because kindness and generosity signal to someone that you want them, respect them, are not just taking them for granted; basic messages so easily trammelled. I need to get in the same car again with The Chap, need this relationship giggled up. It's taken two wake-up calls from thoughtful male readers to glean that.

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Nikki's new book of columns and essays, Honestly (Fourth Estate, $19.99), is out now.