Long Suffering Husband spent a week holidaying with us. It was going to be 4 days, then for a horrible half hour at the airport, it was looking like less, but in the end turned into 10 days. Such is the way of holidaying with a husband in the Financial Services and we take what we can get, because as I’m often reminded: ‘Real people don’t actually go on holiday for 2 months a year.’
That may well be, but when the school you chose (not, sadly, on the basis of how many days a year the children are acutally in school, but (secretly) because they have the cutest uniform) have four months holiday a year, as a stay-at-home mum, your life is all about the holidays.
In the 10 days that Long Suffering spent with us, for the most part he managed remarkably well to ignore his email (it helps to stay at a house that doesn’t have internet access). But half way through, he cracked. ‘I’m just going to check in the with office,’ was how he put it.
Four hours and the batteries of 2 mobile phones later (during which time he paced the garden, staring up at the heavens, saying: ‘How about now? Can you hear me better now?’), I left him to give the children supper while I went to yoga. I figured that way he’d have to stop.
I was wrong. An hour and a half later, I return to see him seated at the table, having resorted to the landline. ‘So lets just go over those figures one more time,’ he says, by way of greeting.
All the compassion and tolerance gathered at yoga has vanished. Along with the children.
‘Where are the children? I ask.
He smiles at me and carries on talking. Clearly the ‘Family Mute’ button is on.
‘I said, where are the children?’ I repeat, slowly and loudly.
‘The what?’
‘Did you give them supper?’
‘Ofcourse I gave them supper,’ he says scornfully, and then, ‘I’ll just finish this off,’ and disappears out of range to a bedroom.
The children, inevitably in front of the tv, feel none of my annoyance.
‘We had a silent supper!’
‘It was so much fun! We had to mime everything!’
‘Why don’t you ever give us such fun suppers?’
After supper follows the inevitable: inevitably he is tired and I am pissed off. Inevitably I say: ‘But I’m trying to keep the family together, I’m doing this for the family!’ and inevitably he replies, ‘But so am I!’ and we go to bed, the stalemate hanging in the air.
But now he is gone and in the quiet evenings I think of the other mothers I know, holidaying with their children while the husband/dad dips in and out. I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t matter that you can afford a lovely house in an idyllic spot – if it means that your husband can’t afford to join you, surely somewhere we have gotten something wrong.
Rosie Rowell 