For people without children it is impossible to fathom how busy you can be entertaining and caring for your progeny, how they can take up a great deal of your time, especially during those precious holidays, usurp it. This is how it’s possible the days fly by, leaving you wondering what on earth it is you did. It wasn’t lying idly in the shade, reading a half-decent novel, that’s for sure. Or even browsing one of those mindnumbing fashion editorials. Hell, you hardly even checked your Facebook newsfeed or retweeted some mindblowing headline.
Well, first of all, you fed your offspring. That means making breakfast, lunch and dinner, although one of these might be avoided by eating out. Secondly, the kids need to be played with. Just placidly floating in the swimming pool is not a realistic option. Even when you try to enter the pool without anyone noticing, knowing the youngsters are miraculously sojourning in another section of the vacation grounds, they find out through some age-old telepathic instinct that also convinces children up to a certain age that nothing beats playing with one of (or, better even, both) their parents. So doing some laps is not a viable alternative either, unless you can manage this with two cheerful but very present minors hanging onto your neck and arms.
No, it will be ball- and kid-throwing from now on, joining in a diving contest, or pretending to be a shark. Before, or after, their pool fun, the children need to be lathered with sunscreen. That’s not something they like, mind you, so it takes quite some patience and persuasion before this is carried out. It takes at least half an hour, and once a day is not enough, not with this August sun beating down on their rain and cloud habituated skin.
Next come the waterballoons. The kids are big enough to fill them with water, but not quite big enough for tying the knot. So that’s where you come in, wriggling your big fingers in impossible curves to make sure the water stays in. Well, at least for a while. And, what’s the use of making the water bombs without having a fight? Before you know it, you get drawn into a water-balloon war, which is actually a lot of fun.
And then there’s the no-fun wars. Sibling wars. You try to figure out what happened, who did what and who is right, which is utterly impossible and exhausting. You notice the big sister ‘accidently’ turning off the tap a bit too late, which causes the balloon to extend beyond its capacity and explode in her little sisters face. You are pretty sure she did it on purpose, but she says ‘no’. So how to deal with it? Next, you catch the little one sticking out her tongue to her sister or hitting her on the head with a naked Barbie-doll. Quite some time is spent in the guise of a blind referee.
Worst of all, when you finally have the opportunity to be by yourself, to clip your toenails for example, because the other parent generously decides to take the little ones snorkeling, you feel torn, as it will be their first time to experience the mystifying underwater silence. When they return with excited stories of salt-and-pepper fish and underwater hedgehogs, pushing and interrupting each other in order to be the first one to tell you, this nagging little splinter of regret gets stuck somewhere between your stomach and solar plexus. So when the plan is hatched to jump off cliffs into the cyan waters of Cala Salada, even though you just planned on checking some emails or brew a peaceful cup of coffee, you resignedly join the excursion. With kids, you just can’t win.
But then again, you already have.
Leo’s first jump ever off a six foot cliff…
Robin doesn’t bat an eye. She just spreads her wings and flies, like the good little bird she is.
Letters to Niels 