“What’s a moment you really noticed yourself change?” I asked my eight- year- old son recently. Without hesitation he answered: “When you finally told me that Santa isn’t real. Everything was different.”

As the school year draws to a close, many young people are standing on a Threshold. For 12 years, their world has been school, hopefully a place where they have been nurtured, engaged and learned skills that they will use in their adult life. For some this world may have thrown up daily challenges, social and academic battles, and for others, who thrived and blossomed in this world, it will be difficult for them to imagine life without it.

The transition into Kindergarten and School is a big one for children and their parents.

With the help of some incredible collaborators we ran a series of workshops that explored this threshold as part of a school holiday program supported by the Macedon Ranges Shire Council.

How do we deal with a holiday that was so obviously created to make us buy more stuff? And how do we honour people on this day who have a bad relationship with their father, have no father, are struggling to be a father or are a father but have lost a child?

One night I was out with a group of friends, to celebrate the fact that the last one of us had finished breastfeeding. There we all were, wearing the dresses with high necklines that had been relegated to the back of the cupboard for years, drinking wine without looking at our watches to check when the baby would wake next.

At the time I felt crazy. I felt like a helicopter parent. An overly anxious mother. The corona virus had been circulating through China for a couple of months already and it was somewhere in the back of our psyche - just not front of mind.

I make no secret about the boldness of this plan. Owning ageing is serious daredevil stuff. Society doesn’t approve. Grey is not the new black and wrinkles can be eradicated, with a sum of your hard earned cash.

Renna is a 12 year old artist who lives in our community. This year she moved to a nearby city and started at a new school. This striking image is an expression of how this threshold has felt for her.

We sat down with Renna and her sister Sachi to ask them how their experience of starting in a new school has been, what helped and what they would say to others who are going through the same transition.

It was a difficult conversation.

I was trying to come to terms with the death of someone far away. Trying to find comfort from someone only slightly less far away. In the same country, but still not within arms length.

It would be so easy for us to make jokes about ‘having the balls’ to make such a big decision here, but we’re above that. Well, perhaps not, but despite all the puns we know that making the decision to have a vasectomy is big.

When I look at the photo of my 17 year old self, I barely recognise the person in the photo.

It’s not because I’ve had a huge physical transformation, although the years have weathered me, rather it’s the person within the skin that I can barely remember. The most profound transformation has been an internal one.

Surrender. During the 36 hour labour I think of the word often. This is the moment to learn that there are two of us in this birthing equation. I might have a carefully worded natural birth plan, but then there is embodied reality.

We throw elaborate parties when people get married but are less equipped as communities to mark divorce or separations.

It doesn’t matter how close you might be to a person, sometimes, when they’re going through a Threshold, it’s difficult to know what to say, and how to be.

Our bodies need sleep. They need sleep to function, but they also need sleep for us to process what is going on in the world. Sleep is as important for new parents as it might be for someone grieving the loss of a good friend or parent.