Growing up, I was always a glass-half-empty sort of person. A doomsdayer. A catastrophiser. Thinking of the worst-case scenario was my speciality. “Stop with those negative waves Moriarty,” my dad would often say to me – a reference to Donald Sutherland’s Oddball character in the 1970 film Kelly’s Heroes. Sutherland’s out-of-place 70s hippy in the middle of the second World War may have been a tongue-in-cheek nod to the era in which the film was made, but his infectious enthusiasm paid dividends, as the unlikely lads pulled off their seemingly impossible Nazi gold heist.
More than anything else, becoming a mum forced me to re-evaluate my default catastrophising ways. I remember thinking that if I was going to be responsible for shaping the lives of little people of my own, while functioning on broken sleep without a clue what I was doing, a more positive mental attitude was needed. The irony of sitting in the doctor’s office chatting through my post-12-week scan blood work on pregnancy number one to find out that my blood type was B Positive was not lost on me.
Nine years on, I’ve learned that being a parent is a worrier’s dream. Show me a parent that doesn’t get carried away thinking every blotch is something serious or that big leap off the swing will land your child in the emergency department. Throw in the world going to hell in a handbasket lately, with wars and a wannabe autocrat sitting at the biggest political desk in the world, and it’s easy to see how people can lose their faith in the good of humanity. Still, I didn’t want to let pessimism be my default setting, or that of my sons.
On one of our regular walks along the beach in Bray, Co Wicklow, my five- and eight-year-old sons and I decided we’d do a message in a bottle. On the many afternoons we’d spent digging trenches and tunnels on the beach in all weathers, we’d imagined what it would be like to come across a message in a bottle ourselves. We always said we’d do one of our own but never followed through – the excitement disappearing into the mundane requirements of everyday life.
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So, at a time when the world feels a bit like a raging bin fire, taking a leap of faith and putting something good out into the universe in the hopes of finding good coming back to us felt like an apt and worthy experiment.
Hello, this is our message in a bottle.
I am eight years old and my brother is five.
We live in Ireland. If you get this message, please send us an email.
Using his best hand, my eight-year-old wrote the note. I set up a brand-new email address no one else knew about. We placed it in a Ziploc bag, popped it in the small glass bottle and threw it into the ocean with a hefty dose of positive waves.
The boys were excited, running around the beach, watching as it disappeared into the water, musing to themselves where it could wash up. “Australia,” my eight-year-old declared with an enviable sense of surety. “Nooooo. Paraguyyyy-yuh [sic],” my five-year-old insisted, his geographic knowledge on top form thanks to him watching the Octonauts go around the globe rescuing bizarre wildlife I’d never heard of. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Paraguay was in fact landlocked, and simply nodded along to both of their wildly optimistic suggestions.
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It was hard not to get carried away though. That’s the thing about positive thinking. It is infectious. Once you start, it plants a seed and changes your outlook, and no one is more full of hope than young children who don’t see the caveats and catastrophes of real life. On the drive home, I started thinking that this was just how a star-studded romcom might begin or that the bottle might wash up on some exotic shore and start an epic, old-fashioned pen-pal relationship. To be honest, we all would have taken it washing up down the coast in Wexford or making its way over to Wales.
Secretly though, the “Moriarty” in me figured it would smash on the rocks and sink to the bottom, the words erased by the water, or that it would get collected up as rubbish. Our hopes were a nice fantasy but sometimes realism has to trump positivity, doesn’t it? I never in a million years believed that someone would find it, open it and take the time to reply.
As the days went by, the flurry of thoughts about the bottle faded, the routine of everyday life taking over. School, work, activities, traffic, homework, what to make for dinner and repeat. But then it happened. An email pinged on my phone with the subject “Message in a bottle”.
“Hello. I was walking my dog, Holly, on Bray beach after Storm Éowyn and I found your message washed up on the beach. I don’t know how long it was in the water but I have sent it back to sea. I hope you are enjoying school and all your friends after the Christmas break. I hope spring comes soon. This is a photo of Holly on Bray beach.”
Shut. The. Front. Door.
I read and reread it to make sure it was genuine before sharing the news. No one else had the email address. The sender even added a photo of his dog on the beach and his full work email signature with his address. It was real.
I laughed then, as it suddenly struck me that the bottle not only washed back up on the same beach, albeit at the other end, but that the man who found it worked in a house only a few streets away. He was likely a fellow beach dog walker we’d passed many times without even knowing it.
The past glass-half-emptier in me would have rolled her eyes and seen it all as an epic fail. The two boys had a different view on it all. They were thrilled that it had been found. More than anything, it was the thoughtful nature of the act itself that had restored my faith in the goodness of people. The kind words tailored for young kids, the sending it back into the sea for more possible adventures and the positivity it brought into our lives and maybe even the finder’s too.
