Dear ones, if you’re reading this, I’m currently travelling alone with one of our children. It’s the autumn holidays and the last few weeks with book launches and election campaigning have been so demanding that I said I urgently needed to get out and about. But as not everyone can come with me, it still feels a bit frazzled.
Because one child is already studying and therefore no longer has time off at the same time as their siblings; the third semester has only just started, so they can’t leave. The other child simply has other plans and is tied to home and dad can’t take a holiday at the moment, so in the end there were only two of us. Are we going anyway? But so much!
We’re both very happy, we’ve never done anything like this before and at the same time the holiday time used to be family time. It was a time of docking, of spending time together intensively once again, of gathering shared experiences.
Everything frays with big children
Now everything’s starting to fall apart a bit, everyone has their own lives and moments together either have to be planned for a long time – or happen spontaneously. Like last week, when by chance all the children were home at the same time and we were able to eat together. How happy that makes us parents. Hah, that was lovely, was our spontaneous reaction.
Or when we wanted to watch a film in the evening a few days later and the boys suddenly joined us and needed to talk so much that we simply switched off the TV. It was about the compatibility of self-tanning cream on the face, about driving at night with 18-year-olds, it was about degree programmes that we had googled.
About other parents and what rules they set, about the upcoming internships that start after the autumn holidays, about „fully dead“ neighbourhoods, about the driving test that’s coming up and about whether we can really talk about an end to the war in Gaza. The whole range of topics. Completely spontaneous and unplanned.
Bad conscience in the luggage
And I realised that I would like to take everyone with me on holiday, but that I also have a guilty conscience in my suitcase because I’m leaving most of the family „at home“ and yet the time together is so valuable and because I’ve hardly been home for an evening in the last few weeks because I have so many appointments and because I actually need so much time with these people because it’s so good for me.
What I would have given to go on holiday with just one person to really relax. Back then, when there was still a constant sibling squabble, something was always falling over and everyone was up at 5.30 am.
Now that all that is a thing of the past and we no longer spend so much time together in everyday life and the little time we do spend together is so totally relaxed, we hardly ever go on holidays like that anymore. At the moment!
I do believe that we’ll at least be able to manage that together once all three of us have moved out. Because if there’s one thing we have in common, it’s our curiosity about the world. And what could be better later than parents who say: Come on, sweeties, let’s go to xy. We’ll invite you… right?
I’m building on that. I’m looking forward to it. And now I’m going to enjoy my one child to the full. Because although my guilty conscience has travelled with me, I’ve locked it away in the cupboard and won’t open it again until I get back…
