There are two great shocks of parenthood. The first is that “Friday night” ceases to mean anything. Babies and toddlers don’t know that Saturday mornings are for dozing and slobbing about. They will continue, as usual, to loudly wake up throughout the night, or at best, rise at 5.45am, appear spookily at your nose, and then mash Blue Bunny into your face.
The second is that “summer holidays” becomes a phrase you dread. When you were young and carefree, the summer holidays were full of dazzling fun at best or simply No School at worst.
As soon as you have children, unless you are one of those outlandishly privileged types with a regular beach-side rental and many “cousins” for your children to tumble about with, the summer holidays loom like a prison sentence.
It’s not the children’s fault. They don’t mean to be so annoying, stressful, constantly bored and hungry. They are simply running the programme “child” on their OS and you just have to wait until it finishes. Ctrl + Alt + Delete won’t work, I’m afraid.
No, the kids are blameless in all this. The malfunction lies with society. First, human beings are not designed to look after their kids on their own. But in our post-industrial, atomised society, that tends to be what happens.
With schools and nurseries shut for the break, friends and any smattering of hired help vanishing for weeks on end, it’s just you and them. It’s as hard work as weekends, only it goes on for six weeks straight.
And if it’s bad weather, like it has been for the last 3,000 dripping, grey days, you will all simply go insane with boredom. If the bad weather continues to hit the week you booked in a rental cottage in Norfolk – because back in February this seemed like a good idea – you will go insane with boredom in a house with dodgy WiFi.
Going abroad won’t help! If you have a baby, their careful routine – which they do have, even if you don’t think they do – will be thrown into disarray and the baby will make its displeasure known by grizzling almost non-stop. If you have another child, they will complain that it is too hot, but also that the air conditioner is too noisy. They will watch downloaded episodes of Bluey from 11am until 3pm every day and get 250 mosquito bites.
Second, the advertising industry has convinced us, over the last however many decades, that summer holidays are the best weeks of your life. This is so that you can be efficiently sold package holidays, flip flops, sunglasses, suncream, ice-cream, barbecues, acrylic flatware, novelty napkins in the shape of watermelons, and garden furniture.
But it is a lie, my friends. The summer holidays are not the best weeks of your life. Or rather, they won’t automatically be the best weeks of your life. Even if the sun does manage to struggle through a chink of the thick stubborn grey cloud for 25 minutes every other Thursday, five minutes after you have given up and left the beach, they are still weeks just like any other. And I think it is the gap between the fantasy we have been sold and the reality of life that causes so much grief.
I have spent the last 13 summers as a parent and in those 13 years I have learned some very valuable and hard lessons as to how to survive. Feel free to go and get a pen.
One: keep your expectations low and then nothing can touch you. With this attitude, that week you spent comprehensively de-nitting the children (and you) will feel like a high point.
Two: think like a solider. When my children were toddlers I read a piece in a newspaper by an ex-soldier dad who brought his army experience into parenting. He introduced me to the concept of the seven Ps: “Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.” Take that to heart. Tattoo it somewhere. Yes, it’s three meals a day for the next six weeks and no one is coming to help you. Do yourself a favour and write out a few meal plans. Thinking up what to eat on the spot is almost impossible, but if you only think about meals for 10 minutes, you will eventually hit a seam of inspiration.
Three: most children like to be in motion, but they quite often don’t mind what they are doing. One afternoon towards the end of August about six years ago, I caught the nearest double-decker bus with my kids and we rode on the top deck all the way to the end of the line and then got out, crossed the road, and caught the same bus line all the way back. They still talk about it. I still occasionally consider doing it.
Four: don’t listen to other parents. There will always be some terrible sadist who wants to tell you what bliss, bliss, bliss their holidays were and how fortunate they are to have their house on a private beach in Ibiza that they inherited from their childless godmother, tax-free. Close your ears to this sort of nonsense. The only people who are capable of being this rude and insensitive are deeply insecure and their children fought non-stop and whined about the heat and the AC, too, don’t worry. They are just liars!
Five: your morale, as a parent, is more important than anything else. Book yourself in for something you will really look forward to a few days after your children return to school or nursery. Mark the date with a massive circle in your diary, hold tight and pray. September might be the January of fashion, but it’s kind of the January of everything else, too.