14 Sep 2015
My mate Jill has a house in Nice, and every year she invites a group of us to join her for a girls’ only long weekend.
This year five of us are going. We plan to swim, sunbathe, drink wine and generally laze about. Given our collective jobs, menfolk, children and aging parents, it’s an annual break we welcome with what borders on an undignified enthusiasm.
Up at crow’s fart, we got a taxi to the airport, zipped through security, and went for breakfast. Waiting for scrambled eggs to arrive, I noticed one of our number consulting a scrappy bit of paper, and jabbing at her phone. Enquiries established she was grocery shopping via a supermarket app, so spouse and sproglets didn’t expire from malnutrition in her absence. She consumed breakfast while chasing up missing school uniform and reminding her husband to purchase new wellies for their youngest child’s imminent school trip.
This got us talking: how much organising had we all done, just for a few precious days of peace?
Another of our number confessed that the previous year she had foolishly considered it enough to simply leave her son with his father. Upon her return she found them both alive and relatively well nourished, which was high or her list of favoured outcomes. The complaining about how hard it was to juggle work and school runs, the mountain of washing so high she required crampons and the look of dread that this might be a yearly event? Not so much. This year she has flown her parents in from Germany to care for both her big boy and her small boy, in the no doubt well placed hope that things will be calm and crampon-free upon her return.
My children’s father consented to solo childcare without flinching, but as my departure approached, his blank face followed by panicked expression made it clear he’d forgotten, forcing me to scrabble for playdates, dog sitters and childcare favours. All very well, but it meant the time I had set aside to get work and packing done evaporated, and I am now on holiday with 20 pairs of pants, no phone charger, and a backlog of work to welcome me home.
Why is it, we wondered, that the menfolk can go away with a wave and a smile, giving domestic arrangements not one moment’s thought, and yet the women are required to undertake the kind of logistical challenges that make the circus leaving town look pitifully simplistic. They can put a man on the moon and they supposedly run the largest corporations in the world, but ask any of our boys to boil their own rice while simultaneously reading a bedtime story, and you’ll find them gibbering in the corner, pleading for their mother. I exaggerate to make the point, but only slightly.
Between us there was only one candidate whose time away involved booking holiday from work, packing and leaving, making us wonder whether her choice to be unmarried and without offspring might actually have been the most sensible of all. Out of interest, I asked her how her live-in boyfriend would cope in her absence.
“He’ll probably sit on the sofa scratching his proverbials and eating from a tin of beans” she shrugged, fondly indifferent to his fate. With that, she floated off on her lilo, chilled rosé in hand.
