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. I want a designated time and place for relaxation. I want to declare my independence at check-in and be carried away slowly on a conveyer belt, draped in a sarong. 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’m tired enough that the existential despair would be lost on me. Five to seven days of fresh towels and organised fun sounds like paradise.
My last proper holiday with my partner, Sam, was in 2015, pre-kids. We bicycled through Mexico City and ate pig’s head soup at tiny stalls on street corners. We stayed in a hotel where you could smoke in the elevator and the pool had a 10-metre unsupervised diving board. 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. 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 slept like we had never slept before or have since; deep and long to the sound of the Pacific Ocean.
There were no kids clubs or chicken nuggets or inflatable pool toys. “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. “We’ll be adventurous parents. If we stay for a few months or more we’ll get a great deal on accommodation. Our kids will speak Spanish! And we’ll pick it up, eventually.”
We had our first child in 2016 and our second a year later. We shared our plans to go to Mexico loudly in the beginning. We loved the way the words sounded to our friends who didn’t have kids. The way it affirmed everybody’s secret hopes that becoming parents didn’t really need to change your life all that much. Over the months, as the toddler-baby reckoning consumed our souls, going away for fun became a twisted paradox. 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.
We were still going to Mexico but only to prove a point. We were adventurous parents. The children were two and three at the time. We planned the trip with pits in our stomachs, like horses being walked into a bullring.
By the time Covid arrived, I had been home in a dressing gown for four straight years. I was quietly relieved when international travel was banned. It meant we could cancel our Mexico plans and never speak of them again.
The kids are school-age now. They can brush their teeth and put on shoes. They can entertain each other. The screams from the bath are often screams of joy.
We’re ready for a holiday. But now I have nothing to prove. My sense of pride has been conveniently obliterated. I want a resort with chicken nuggets and the option to join a conga line around the pool.
I called a travel agent and shared my desire for the getaway equivalent of a partial lobotomy. Suzette suggested eight days in an all-inclusive international resort franchise with trapeze lessons for the kids. It sounded perfect. Then she said it would cost $11,936.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Including flights!” Suzette said.
“It’s just – I made porridge for lunch today.”
“I see … Would you consider a cruise?”
“A cruise?”
“Yes. You could go on an all-inclusive cruise for closer to $3,000,” she said, “Plus flights to and from Sydney.”
“A luxury cruise? Like in the first bit of Triangle of Sadness?”
“No.”
There’s a reason international mega-cruises are popular with old people and parents with young children: we’re budget-conscious and very, very tired. The online reviews of Suzette’s suggested cruise weren’t great. They listed cold showers and stubborn sewage smells and swimming pools akin to human soup. There’s also the cruise industry’s grave environmental impact to consider. If the surviving marine life could talk the reviews would be more scathing still.
At this stage we’re considering a week at home with margaritas and unlimited heater time.
Family holiday pending.
• Ashe Davenport is a writer and author
