Why you don’t have to be single or carefree to have your own version of a hot-girl summer — even after 40

Writer Caro Giles discovers that you don’t have to be young and carefree to experience your own ‘hot girl summer’ at 40+.

Words: Caro Giles. Images: Shutterstock

I first heard the phrase ‘hot-girl summer’ when one of my daughters caught me twirling in front of the mirror in a little sundress, blasting tinny music out of my mobile phone.

I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded like something to aspire to; something fun and removed from the challenges of domestic life. When my daughter suggested I could have a hot-girl summer, my heart skipped a bit, because it had been so long since I had been a girl – during the past few years, I have been a mother first and foremost, an ex-wife, a carer, but rarely carefree enough to consider myself a girl.

I certainly hadn’t felt hot – more like my youth was melting away and at some point in the near future I’d be invisible and dried up, with the prospect of romance a vain hope. Recent summers have been sprinkled with moments of magic: staring at super moons rising above an indigo sea; lying in sand dunes watching marram grass flicker against film-blue skies; spotting the slick of a black head and realising I’m swimming metres away from seals.

Regular readers of my words will know that it can be hard for me to leave the house, and I’ve had to work hard for these moments of magic. For a long time, I’ve cast spells that involve my daughters. I hope that the seconds we spend together sprinkled with awe will stay stuck in their minds, like the glitter I keep finding between the floorboards.

I want the dark times to sink away into the shadows and be replaced by light. I want them to remember their childhoods as glowing, not gloomy. It has been a privilege, and also a source of huge joy, to navigate life as a tribe with my daughters. They teach me so much and I have risen to the challenge of living a life on the edge.

But it has also been a solitary existence. You might wonder how life as a single parent-carer of four children can be described as solitary, but despite the girls whirling around me, and a life so full it is spilling over, I am often held in thrall to the thoughts in my head. I have frequently been alone with these thoughts, because they are grown-up thoughts that I can’t share with my girls, so the sense I live with is still one of solitude, and the spells that I cast have sometimes been just for me.

They usually involve running as fast as I can with music blaring in my ears, dancing in fields where no one can see me, or in the kitchen as pasta bubbles on the stove. But for my hot-girl summer, which I am repurposing so that it meets my time-stretched, middle-aged needs, I am dipping my toe into a brave new world.

Turns out I can transform from a spinning sea witch mother into a wild bass line-thrashing, globe-trotting hot girl. But it’s not easy. It involves a lot of childcare juggling, and managing a constant push-pull of emotions as I veer between mother and girl. Sometimes, inevitably, the two collide. This morning, following 48 hours of shedding the mother, I knelt down on the train platform to find something in my suitcase.

As I simultaneously tried to upload money onto my daughter’s dinner-money account, some lacy underwear slid out of my case – it was a perfect illustration of how messy this hot-girl’s summer can be. The reality is that in middle-age we all carry a lot more baggage. On the dating apps they call it ‘drama’, and I have actively avoided anyone who claims in their biog to be averse to drama.

I am full of drama, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The trick, I have discovered, is surrounding myself with people who aren’t scared of drama – relish it, even. The definition of a hot-girl summer seems to be carefree, independent and fun. It’s hard to be carefree when you’re the sole carer of four children, but it’s also important to try.

This year, I’ve watched sun sparkle on the Adriatic Sea, bought a tight sequinned ballgown just because, and walked the streets of a new city with a beautiful stranger. Each window of time I create in which to be carefree is tiny, like the pieces of sea glass I collect on the beaches near my Northumbrian home.

So small that it can feel like a breath released after swimming underwater before I gulp and submerge myself once more. Perhaps that’s what my middle-age hot-girl summer is – a series of brief, beautiful breaths.

Caro’s memoir, Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Harper North, £9.99) is out now