The age you'd be again.

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I want to go on holiday to about… 12 years ago.

Not to leave the life I’m living, at the age I am, in the body I’ve earned. But just to visit another time.

Is this the inevitable nostalgia that comes with age? The predictable, sentimental inkling that there are some eras you didn’t savour enough when you were in them. Or is this wisdom? The realisation that every mundane day isn’t just a race to get somewhere, but, you know, The Point?

I’m asking because on Out Loud on Friday we asked each other - Mia, Em and I - what specific age we’d like to go back to, because we’d scrolled across Oprah answering the question. “Forty-four,” she told Keke Palmer, without hesitation. “Life starts at 44. You come into yourself in a way that you’re not just trying to please someone else … For me it was 44 when I locked in.”

Listen to the show, here:

Look, if Oprah wasn’t locked in before that, considering all the Oprah-ness she’d already achieved, maybe the rest of us should question our commitment, but I digress.

What age would you be again?

I couldn’t settle on a number. Not because I live in some kind of perfect, present contentment but because there are too many to choose from. And I’d like to revisit them all, please.

I would like to spend a weekend in 2013, when my children were tiny. Their soft and sticky small hands in mine, the weight of them pushing into my exhausted body as I lay beside them at night. The togetherness of it, the four of us moving as one small, chaotic unit. I’d like to sit on the bench in the park I came to loathe, and watch my daughter rip the polyester-sparkle skirt of her Elsa dress as she runs at full pelt to the thrill of the roundabout. Taste the first sip of coffee that felt like an unfathomable luxury in an era all about output for the benefit of others, not input for your own pleasure.

And on that weekend visit I’d like to re-experience my son reaching his arms above his head for me to lift him, his palms to rest on my cheeks, the smell of his head that was always in the crook of my neck. And to feel the post-Bedtime collapse of Brent and I onto the couch, so drained by the constant demands of keeping small people alive we can barely speak. But we could wonder at finding ourselves in the middle of a wild, deeply ordinary adventure as we took the first sip of wine that felt like an unfathomable luxury in a life all about output for the benefit of others, not input for your own pleasure.

The energy of this photo, please.

I’d like to travel to that place. But hell, I don’t want to stay there.

I’d like to revisit 2009. My parents, healthy, newly retired, up for adventure. We went to Tasmania and I booked us into a truly terrible pub in Hobart. My Mum was trying to be nice about the dark rooms, the peeling wallpaper, the noise pounding the floor from the bar below. And then she sat on a wooden dining chair at the tiny formica table and it collapsed underneath her. We lost our breath to laughter.

And the time Mum and Dad came and I took them to Queensland, and we went on a big, busy touristy boat out to the Reef. Mum wasn’t going to snorkel. Scared of the deep water, scared of the creatures, scared of the current. The staff threw her a “noodle” to help her float, and she agreed, tentatively, to try. Minutes pass, and the noodle lands back on deck. An hour passes, and I swim out to the top of her head to tell her they’re serving lunch on the boat. “I can have lunch any day,” Mum tells me, with the splashy arc of a wide, shoo-ing arm. “I’m snorkelling on the GREAT BARRIER REEF.”

I’d like to spend 24 hours on each of those trips. I want to remember what that felt like, believing everything would be like this forever.

Or three days in 2002, when I spent a month alone in Thailand after quitting a job that had finally fulfilled its purpose - earning me my permanent Australian residency. I had broken up with someone I should absolutely have broken up with but I played sad songs and cried in cheap hotel beds until I didn’t any more. Drinking cold beer with an earnest German who told me that I must have a lot of admiration for Robbie Williams because “He’s done so much for your country”. Learning that yes, monkeys are cute but also they wank a lot and will snatch a wallet from your hand.

I ate a green papaya salad from a street market stall in Chiang Mai from a paper box with chopsticks. It was so extraordinarily, explosively, tinglingly good the next day I tried to eat it again. I wandered all over the city, thinking I must have missed it, passed it, forgotten exactly where it was. But the stall had packed up and moved.

I’d like to holiday in that fresh start, that freedom, that blank page. That papaya salad.

There are so many more. What was it like, really, that last day of school, smashed eggs running down my customised uniform and cans of Special Brew in a damp park? The last dinner I had with my friend who died before anyone should, so proud to show off his grown-up house, his spaghetti bolognese? I’d like to spend a few hours walking around London with my best friend in 1994 when we had lived there for couple of years and we were constantly marvelling that we’d done it - moved cities, got jobs, we were paying rent and making pesto-pasta for dinner and meeting our mates in pubs in Soho after work. Like grown-ups. How did that feel, really?

I can almost time-travel the moment I knew I was in love with Australia. That I never wanted to leave, that I had found a home, bizarrely, perversely, so far from where I started. I was in nature, in a predictably beautiful bushy spot, lying on a rock with a deep warmth at my back and strong sense of something like ecstasy in my blood. No chemicals had been ingested. That feeling, so hard to express with any honest accuracy even now, was life-changing. I can almost taste it.

Introducing my new boyfriend Brent to some of my oldest friends.

The moments my children were born, all terror and joy. The night Brent and I decided we were A Thing, dancing The Nutbush in a barn-like pub not so far from where we live, now. First Christmas with my baby niece. Last one with my Mother In Law. My best friend’s wedding, with all the love and drama of such a momentous occasion.

So no, I don’t have an age I’d like to be again. This one will do. But I would like to holiday in the past. A long weekend at 21, a day trip to 40, a cheeky fortnight at 32.

And then I would travel back to now, where I know so much more than I did, and so much less than I will, and be here writing this as the kids come home from school, great lunking teenagers that they are, and come to interrupt me with a demand for some specific food, or some money, or a lift, or some permission to go somewhere and do something that might feel a bit like running towards a roundabout in your ripped Elsa dress.

And then call my Mum. And ask her, while I can, if maybe she remembers the day she didn’t want to come out of the water on the Great Barrier Reef.

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Me, Em, Amelia, Mia, Clare and Jessie have all chosen two of our all-time favourite books to give away to one Mamamia subscriber.

Here they are:

Amelia: Famesick by Lena Dunham and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Em: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld and Yellowface by R.F Kuang

Me: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Spare by Prince Harry

Jessie: Heart The Lover by Lily King and Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Mia: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Clare: Disclaimer by Renee Knight and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

If you are already subscribed to Mamamia, you’re already in the running to win this list. If you’re not, sign up now, and you will be.

Click here to subscribe and enter.

MIA: Hair ties from KKneckie, bought from Jumbled. Mia loves their colours, their heft, and the fact they don’t look daggy on your wrist.

EM: Merit Flush Balm Blush - she says it’s exxy but perfection

Me: Kitchen Cabinet, hosted by Annabel Crabb, on ABC iview. So happy it’s back.

And of course, I need to recommend this week’s subscriber episode about Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and how the hell he’s managed to keep Hollywood in the divorce that cost him his kids. Here:

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