Adding to the chaos brought about by the baggage confusion is the impact that the early start already seems to be having on the youngest traveller in our party – it’s either that or he’s simply being an arse, as he is tantruming good and proper about having to sit in his buggy. Having heard horror stories about mangled prams with missing wheels turning up on the baggage-reclaim carousel, we decided to buy a cheap-as-chips lightweight buggy especially for this holiday. It is so flimsy, though, that the physical force of Jude’s tantrum – flailing his legs around, clawing at the buggy straps – is causing it to move across the floor even when the brakes are on. Ordinarily, the sight of the buggy bouncing up and down like one of those cars with hydraulic suspension you see in hip-hop videos would be quite funny – but we’ve been up for four hours, we’ve not had breakfast and tempers are already frayed. Suddenly, a caravan in Cornwall seems like the best idea in the world but we’re heading through to Departures now so I shall see you on the other side.
13:05 local time
Well, we have made it to France! Our cottage is the bee’s knees and the sun is shining. I cannot tell you how relieved I was to feel the rush of dry, warm air as we stepped off the plane. The flight itself turned out to be nowhere near as troublesome as we’d anticipated (mostly thanks to the gummy bears and the Peppa Pig episodes downloaded to the iPad), but the final hour or so before we boarded left me tempted to wave the kids off on to a different plane. Hip-carrying a protesting Jude while clutching our boarding passes and trying to keep our passports open at the right pages was all kinds of stressful. Meanwhile, James was separating our electronic devices to put them in the trays to go through the scanner and trying to explain to Henry why people were being frisked. There’s only so much hip-kicking and arm-punching that I can take, so once we’d got through Security I put Jude down. I couldn’t help but daydream about how nice it would have been to test some perfumes or treat myself to some posh foundation, but instead I found myself bolting after my toddler-sized cannonball, who seemed intent on tripping up the duty-free shoppers, prompting my usual declaration of ‘Watch where you’re going, sweetheart, look out for other people!’ Jude doesn’t give a shit what I’m saying, of course – this was solely for the other people’s benefit, so they wouldn’t think me a terrible mother.
We have been in another country for a little over two hours and a notable ‘highlight’ so far has been the barney that erupted almost immediately after we picked up the hire car and drove out of the airport. James was acclimatising to driving on the right while I was trying unsuccessfully to decipher the French satnav, and this resulted in us doing two full loops of the same roundabout, both convinced we were all going to die. The already stressful situation was compounded by the boys complaining from the back that they were too hot/were thirsty/couldn’t hear the radio as James and I snapped back and forth with the same conversation:
‘Is it this one, babe? Is it this exit?’
‘Why are you asking me? I don’t fucking know. In a minute, Henry. Jesus.’
But we made it and, despite our very early start, the feral duty-free child and the almost-divorce on the roundabout, I feel the most relaxed I have felt in a long time. I am proud of us for making it here. I know that probably sounds really naff to seasoned family travellers (like, wow, you made it to France, big deal) but I often feel like it’s not plain sailing at home with the kids and, having spent the last four years presuming that holidays abroad would just not be worth it, this moment here feels like a glimmer of promise. Some uninterrupted family time is long overdue.
Thursday 9th
We’re having a lovely time. Oh God. That has just reminded me of the postcards I sent home to relatives whenever I went on holiday as a child. ‘We’re having a lovely time!’ was the stock unimaginative thing I would write on each and every one. But we are.
This week so far hasn’t been without its challenges but, shy of the boys having behavioural transplants, we always knew that would be the case. Playing games in the garden with Henry has proved to be as frustrating as always, mainly because, as far as I can tell (and just the same as at home), the rules appear to be:
1. Henry makes the rules.
2. Henry is within his rights to change the rules at any time.
Which, in practical terms, means that whenever I am dragged from my sun-lounger to play an imaginary game I am told off within seconds for doing it all wrong. Take Star Wars this morning: I had to be Darth Vader because he wanted to be Yoda, only I was absolutely not allowed to do my Darth Vader impression where I do the heavy breathing into my hands (I was just trying to get into character as I didn’t feel very convincing as Darth in my panic-purchase bikini). Apparently, my imaginary lightsaber swishing wasn’t up to Henry’s exacting standards, either.
‘No, Mummy, not like that!’
‘I thought that’s what you just did. I was copying you.’
‘Well, now I’ve changed it.’
(In my head): Of course you fucking have.
(Out loud): ‘I see. Who wants an ice cream?’
Generally, the most frustrating thing thus far has been the inability to do anything in peace for more than about two minutes, which, admittedly, is just like being at home but is somehow intensified when you can almost touch the chance of reading a book in the sunshine. Sunbathing is simply not the relaxing holiday experience of yesteryear, particularly when doing so in close proximity to the pool. I daren’t close my eyes for a second in case somebody drowns and even when one of us is trying to give the other a break for five minutes it’s impossible to sunbathe when you can hear frantic splashing and shouts of ‘Yes, in a minute, Henry. I’ve only got one pair of hands.’ Suddenly, you feel guilty for trying to tan the extra pair of hands your spouse needs to keep two children afloat. There is also the constant sun-cream worry. We seem to have sussed it with Henry, who is happy to have sun cream on and sit in the shade over lunchtime. Jude, though, resists both the sun-cream application and the shade, tottering around with his ghostly white skin and strawberry-blond hair in the full midday sun, leaving me to kind of throw cream at him from close range or entice him indoors for a lolly. Just an hour – half an hour – to feel the sun on my face without being consumed by sunburn worries would be nice.
However, I had a bit of a moment in the pool yesterday which I think pretty much sums up the whole holidaying-with-kids experience. James and the boys were playing on one side of the pool so I jumped in to lie on one of those inflatable rings, wedging my bum into the middle and draping my legs over the edge of it so my feet were in the water but the rest of me was basking in sunshine. It felt so good and, for the shortest of moments, I lay with my eyes closed in pure bliss, listening to birds singing … until I became increasingly aware that I could hear Henry pretending to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Raphael, probably). Before I had time to react he had loaded up a water pistol and was aiming it, along with an array of pool-toy missiles, at my head, while shouting, ‘Cowabunga!’ I was initially pretty pissed off that my blissful state had been ruined (and annoyed about having objects lobbed in the direction of my face) but as the three of them laughed at me from the side of the pool – I had fallen off the ring by this point and was trying to say, ‘You absolute bastards’ through a mouthful of pool water – it struck me that these are probably the holiday moments I’ll look back on with the most fondness in years to come. All the memories of my child-free holidays seem to have merged into one long sunbathing scene in my head – bar the crazy three weeks I spent sleeping on rooftops in Morocco (but that was a post-university adventure I needed to get out of my system). Granted, the long sessions spent reading books on a sun-lounger were glorious and, if I’m honest, there have been many times since I’ve become a mum when I have fantasised about those times and said, ‘Take me back!’ There have been more times still when I have wanted to slap our tanned and rested photograph faces for not appreciating the extent of our freedom. ‘Let’s have a three-hour nap before dinner,�
�� we would say. Twats.
But somehow it means more to have time away with the boys, as it’s quality time we just don’t seem to find at home. For somebody who is usually so terrible at ‘cherishing every moment’, I have had a bloody good bash at doing so this week. For the first time in ages I’ve had the breathing space to stop and really take in how much Henry and Jude are changing. How much they are growing up. If we are fortunate enough to go on holiday every year, either in the UK or abroad, I hope it will provide a once-yearly opportunity to drink them in a bit, to bank memories of what they were doing, saying and even wearing at certain ages.
I suspect the memories banked from this week will be the ones I can pinpoint as the year I went on holiday as mum to a four-year-old obsessed with Ninja Turtles and a nearly-two-year-old obsessed with his brother. Our photograph faces are neither tanned nor rested but they are happy. Properly happy. Even without any naps.
Sunday 12th
It’s almost time to go home – we are due to fly back tomorrow morning. I’m absolutely gutted to be leaving. It’s not so much that I don’t want to go home, it’s just that I know what going home will bring. It will bring the return of Shouty Mum, who flies off the handle and ignores her children because she so desperately needs to moderate her Facebook-page posts. Of course, this holiday has not been totally immune to me flying off the handle and I did go off on one a little bit yesterday when we visited a local castle. In one of the rooms they had a whole load of regal dressing-up gear and I had been looking forward to trying on some clothes and taking some funny pictures of us all as a royal family, but Henry shouted almost immediately that he was bored and Jude tried to escape down the sixteenth-century spiral staircase, leaving me stood on my own with the camera dressed as fucking Anne Boleyn.
And there has been bickering – mostly bickering between the kids over toys and bickering between me and James about them bickering over toys – but even the bickering feels easier on holiday. I’m better able to cope with it, to laugh it off and not lose my absolute shit when somebody says, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum, MUM!’ on repeat for twelve hours.
I’ve come to the conclusion that going on holiday is a bit like having an affair. Not because we checked into a hotel under a fake name and spent a week in our room having wild sex (is that what people who have affairs do?) but because this week it has felt like we’ve been living our normal life minus the worst of the crap that makes everyday life so hard. With an affair, I’m sure the grass seems greener because you are always getting the best of somebody, stealing moments to pretend you are a couple, when the truth is that if you really were a couple you would wake up and find his socks from yesterday in little scrunched sock-balls on the floor and he would see your ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ Christmas pyjama top and your prickly stubble-fanny – and at some stage you would each hear the other doing a poo, because that’s real life. Before long you’d be quarrelling over the car’s MOT being due and outlining all the reasons it can’t possibly be you who takes a day off work because the toddler is poorly.
On holiday, it’s been easier to mediate fights over who has the last croissant, to change wet bedsheets and to try and explain the rules of a board game to a child who can’t accept rules that don’t result in him winning. It’s been easier because we haven’t also been trying to take work calls, do the housework and generally crack through the ever-multiplying list of things we haven’t got around to doing but really need to.
I didn’t check social media for four days at the start of this week and, while I know that hardly qualifies me for a stint on The Island with Bear Grylls, it was quite the eye-opener. I have realised just how much I am glued to my smartphone and, do you know what? My social-media pages were right there where I left them. Even though there were emails flagged as ‘urgent’, I hadn’t been worrying about them because I hadn’t read them. Instead, I invested my time in being a mum. Not a working mum getting twitchy over writing deadlines and not a stressy mum shouting at everybody because she has lost control and wants to hide in a dark room. Just Mum. I think that is why I have enjoyed this holiday most of all. Because I have felt more like a mum here. A proper, normal mum, fussing over sun cream and making nice lunches and enjoying doing those things.
Sometimes, at home, it feels like day-to-day life is just all of us existing. Plodding through each day but not truly living. I roll my eyes and pretend to stick my fingers down my throat at the merest whiff of anything which tells me to ‘live in the moment’ but, deep down, I know that I could try a bit harder to do so. It’s just that I’m so busy worrying about what I said yesterday and what’s coming up tomorrow that I never take in what is happening in the here and now.
It would be lovely to think that I will take something of this present-moment-living back home with me, but I can’t imagine that I will. We will slot back into our everyday lives at home, the real ones, and all of this will be a memory. A good memory.
I’ve enjoyed the affair.
Tuesday 14th
08:21
I miss the holiday already. James is back at work and I am back to being stressed, having remembered that Henry has his first school ‘settling in’ session today. Dad and Tina are coming over to look after Jude so Henry and I can head up to school, just us two. I’m feeling a bit unsettled and I don’t think it’s purely the school thing. I think it’s also because James is now officially a part-time worker and, from tomorrow, will be at home with the boys so that I can work. I can’t even process my thoughts on this right now, though, as I am in the midst of a wardrobe dilemma, trying to decide what to wear for this school visit. Do I go for my everyday jeans and jumper, i.e. the safety zone? Or do I make a bit more of an effort, taking into account that this is the first time I will meet most of the parents from Henry’s class? Then again, if I do make an effort, will I be setting myself up for future failure when, further down the line, I rock up for school pick-up in an old pair of joggers teamed with James’s hoody? I considered wearing a bold ‘statement’ jacket I bought from Zara – it’s probably the nicest thing I own at present – but if I do that, am I risking being ‘accepted’ by a trendy-mum clique I have no hope of keeping up with? The kind of mums who might think my statement jacket looks all right without knowing it’s brand-new and the only remotely statementy item in my wardrobe? What sort of first impression am I trying to make here? Jesus, we’ve not even made it through the school gates yet and I am already feeling uncomfortable.
13:15
I went for the jeans-and-jumper safety zone in the end, but I did spend time getting my hair into one of those messy buns – the kind where it actually takes quite a lot of effort to get it just the right amount of messy. I also threw on a decent watch and a necklace, which I hope gave an overall ‘casual but not crap’ vibe. Who knows? One thing I do know is that being at school as a parent took me right back to actually being at school. Standing in the reception lobby, waiting to be called in by one of the jolly teachers, I wasn’t sure if Henry was holding on to my hand or I was holding on to his. I felt like whispering, ‘Don’t leave me with all these mums,’ but then I remembered that I was the adult so I tried to look as though I didn’t want to run home (I did) as I sneaked glances at the other parents and silently formed judgements about where they shop and who I might get on with.
I am a smiley, eye-contact sort of person; if someone is looking at me and I catch them looking (or vice versa), I flash what I hope is my most genuine smile. I used to assume that everybody did this but, over time, I have learned that some folk are not smiley, eye-contact people and are in fact cold-hearted smile ignorers. Who the hell doesn’t return a smile? Well, one mum didn’t return my smile. She can’t have missed it, as I went all-out big toothy smile, but she rested her eyes on my smiley face for a good two seconds before looking away. Perhaps my smile was a bit deranged or perhaps she’s read the blog, already knows that she hates me and everything I stand for as a parent and is going to spread the word among the PTA so I’ll be ostracised in a co
rner of the playground … oh Gawd! I just want to fit in, as a mum, here. I always just want to fit in.
Tuesday 21st
11:05
Last Thursday I was in the throes of having a meltdown about something annoying but ultimately unimportant (how milk-sodden Coco Pops had ended up in my handbag) when I turned on the TV to find that Jo Cox MP had been murdered. I stood rooted to the spot with my mouth open, watching the breaking news story, but changed the channel when I realised Henry had stopped playing Lego Juniors on the iPad and was staring at the coverage.
It has been on my mind ever since. I can’t stop thinking about her husband and their children. How their family of four became a family of three just like that and how our family unit simply could not work if any of us were missing. We are a team and that’s just how it is. As I picked the soggy Coco Pops out of my bag, I recognised the familiar shift in feeling that a sudden sense of perspective brings. One minute I was infuriated about my handbag lining being ruined and the next I was grateful that a ruined handbag was my biggest worry. I always welcome the smack around the chops that a dose of perspective brings, but I hate myself for needing to hear something so heart-breaking about another person’s life to feel grateful for my own.
Today – well, today, the perspective journey continues. Literally a journey, in fact, as I’m writing this from Carriage B of a choo-choo train to London. I promised myself that I’d drop the choo-choos whenever the kids aren’t present but it’s become a bit of a habit and I find it hard to lose the child-speak, which is probably why I also asked the man in the coffee shop on platform five if I could have milkies in my tea.
The Unmumsy Mum Diary Page 11