We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. “A cruise?” skip past newsletter promotion “It’s just – I made porridge for lunch today.” Suzette suggested eight days in an all-inclusive international resort franchise with trapeze lessons for the kids. I called a travel agent and shared my desire for the getaway equivalent of a partial lobotomy. I want a resort with chicken nuggets and the option to join a conga line around the pool. My sense of pride has been conveniently obliterated. The screams from the bath are often screams of joy. They can brush their teeth and put on shoes. It meant we could cancel our Mexico plans and never speak of them again. I was quietly relieved when international travel was banned. We planned the trip with pits in our stomachs, like horses being walked into a bullring.īy the time Covid arrived, I had been home in a dressing gown for four straight years. The children were two and three at the time. We were still going to Mexico but only to prove a point. Beach bags became stuffed with nappies and wipes and bottles and fruit goo and eczema salves that I’d spend half the time Googling, breathing shallowly at the thought of my baby’s possibly “thinning” skin. Over the months, as the toddler-baby reckoning consumed our souls, going away for fun became a twisted paradox. The way it affirmed everybody’s secret hopes that becoming parents didn’t really need to change your life all that much. We loved the way the words sounded to our friends who didn’t have kids. We shared our plans to go to Mexico loudly in the beginning. We had our first child in 2016 and our second a year later. Our kids will speak Spanish! And we’ll pick it up, eventually.” If we stay for a few months or more we’ll get a great deal on accommodation. “We’ll come back with our kids if or when have them,” we said dreamily on the sand, watching a small child carrying a squid out of the sea. There were no kids clubs or chicken nuggets or inflatable pool toys. We slept like we had never slept before or have since deep and long to the sound of the Pacific Ocean. In the evenings we would descend the cliff face to the sleepy town, where we ate Argentinian barbecue from an outdoor kitchen crowded with stray dogs, watching the sun set. We finished the trip in a hut on the cliffs of Mazunte, where we slept for eight days in bed, on beaches and in hammocks waking for mid-morning micheladas and huevos rancheros. We stayed in a hotel where you could smoke in the elevator and the pool had a 10-metre unsupervised diving board. We bicycled through Mexico City and ate pig’s head soup at tiny stalls on street corners. My last proper holiday with my partner, Sam, was in 2015, pre-kids. Five to seven days of fresh towels and organised fun sounds like paradise. I’m tired enough that the existential despair would be lost on me. I would like to be pampered to death on a luxury cruise like David Foster Wallace in his story A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I want to declare my independence at check-in and be carried away slowly on a conveyer belt, draped in a sarong. I want a designated time and place for relaxation. I want to take my family on a holiday somewhere warm, where I don’t have to worry about transport or what to eat or think at all.
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