Empty.

Tonight I handed the kids back to my ex, on her return from the US. I'd been living in her house for 8 days, hanging out with the kids on school holidays.

As always, I find myself feeling very spent and empty after handing them back. It really shouldn't be a surprise, this happens every time. But it's the same - I feel guilty elation at finally getting rid of them, then a horrible strange sadness as I shake myself and try to remember what the rest of of my life's like, the bits where I'm not doing laundry, cooking, playing, trying to stop them killing each other. It's made worse by my having to stay here in Melbourne for a few days, and even though I say I love Melbourne it makes me sad and confused - I don't know many people here, I'm sort of homeless. And I can't escape the feeling when I'm here that my life's gone nowhere, I'm back where I started.

So by 7 o'clock tonight I'd handed the kids back but was left feeling profoundly sad and uneasy. I drove about aimlessly for a while getting more and more agitated. Driving around Melbourne like that reminds me of being about 20, and how inner-city Melbourne seemed like a magical playground where anything was possible. Now it all seems so hopelessly small-scale, but I know that most of that is just me being jaded and middle-aged, and it's that effect you get when you look down the wrong end of a telescope.

At one point this afternoon I took the kids on a slight detour from our usual route and we ended up parked outside a decrepit-looking house in Clayton North, just opposite Monash University. "Why are we here? What are you doing" etc... but it was the house I lived in when I was the age my oldest son is now. Back then it was a nice, smart big (double-block) house, but in the intervening 35 years it's been split up and rented out as student housing. The yard was all overgrown and in the middle of it was an old car that, judging by the undergrowth, hadn't been moved in years. "Is that your car from when you were a boy?" inquired my younger son, momentarily interested.

I probably didn't need to see all that today.