“Part Time” Parents Crack Under Holiday Stress
Sally Warner

I see a version of this every summer. Not as a professional but as a colleague and friend. This time it is Susie all excited about the holiday she’s looked forward to since Christmas with her partner and kids.
She only works mornings so spends a good deal more time with the children (five and seven) than her partner does. He works away quite a lot so for much of the year she is more or less a single parent. Getting up alone, seeing to the children alone, going to work, picking up the children, doing the shopping, cooking for the family, bathing the kids and putting them to bed. Her “me” time is limited to the hours of 7.30pm-10.30pm when like it as not she’ll be doing the washing, housework and ironing, and making up the packed lunches. Her social life is non-existent. Her fellow Tony is used to having a lot of time to himself – a drink and dinner every evening from Sunday to Thursday and often Friday in a pub somewhere with the other contractors or on his own if he feels like it. The jobs are usually too far from home to commute to each day and the hours can be very long which is why it pays well. Tony can choose what he does our of work hours with abandon when he is away because other than the routine of making a quick phone call home to say goodnight to the kids every evening, he is on his own. For some men that would be a penance – a price to be paid for earning enough to keep the family afloat but for Tony – well, he’s the sort who may say he misses home life but you know he is like a pig in muck really, enjoying the best of both worlds. No one to keep him in check and no one to stop him from doing exactly as he likes. He seems to me to be the type that could easily have two relationships on the go… not that Susie believes he is unfaithful in that sense, more that he seems divorced from their shared life most of the time.
To the kids seeing Dad home, on the weekends he does get back, is a treat. Tony can, of course, keep up the attentive, caring Dad role for these short bursts of time, spoiling the kids, taking them out for treats and often destroying any kind of normal routine. Mum is the one who has to deal with the tantrums and the tummy aches, chastise them if they misbehave, make sure they do their homework and play fairly with each other. She is always the bad cop in this relationship and though the children love her to bits they know they can get away with murder where their Dad is concerned and so they stretch that knowledge to the very limit. Come the time for the family holiday, which for Tony means 14 days and nights of full-on family time, which he is dreading and has tried to wriggle out of more than once, expectations are mixed. Whereas Susie can’t wait to get away because to her it means a rare change of scene with someone else to share the hassle of getting to the airport and getting on the plane, not to mention the supervision of the kids in the pool and the sea, hardly any cooking to bother about, and a grown up around she can talk to.
Not surprisingly Susie’s expectations of a great time are blown apart by the over-excited kids playing up to their Dad who doesn’t know when to say no to them. Susie is left to deal with both kids being sick having eaten too much ice cream and too many sweets, and to their tantrums. Tony always heads to his comfort zone, the bar, to escape any ructions where he easily pals up with other Dads equally uncomfortable dealing with the messier day to day parenting. Susie’s dinner out is cancelled again and again. The apartment is no bigger than a shoe cupboard so privacy is nonexistent and the kids can hear their parents every word and move through the hardboard walls. The outside balcony isn’t big enough to sit out on so all plans have to revolve around the kids’ waking hours. Not that that’s a problem in itself, it is just that Susie was really hoping to have some quiet time with Tony, a dinner or two together, that sort of thing. Instead it is over-excited kids all the time, too boisterous to be taken anywhere “grown up” and misbehaving really badly. Susie wanted them to try out the kids club for a session – the kids threw tantrums and Tony over –ruled her. Seeing as she chose the resort particularly for its children’s facilities which had been recommended by a friend she is seething that Tony won’t put his foot down and back her up knowing full well that once the kids enter the club and get involved in its activities it’ll be hard to persuade them to leave. Tony has slunk away several times leaving Susie and the kids to it which has riled her as he and the kids to a degree are the only ones having any kind of holiday.
How does a lovely girl like Susie tell Tony that she has had enough of his selfishness and inconsiderate behaviour. That she’d rather he took a local job for less money so that they could share the parenting equally and they’d each have more time for each other. If she complains Tony calls her a nag and a spoilsport in front of the kids. Kids being what they are take his side. His mother is no more supportive. A doormat herself, she has never expected Tony do so much as wash a cup let alone cook a meal and takes it as a personal affront that Susie has any complaint to make at all. In her family the men are measured purely by what they put on the table, nothing else counts. It has become intolerable for Susie and she is already thinking that she’d be better off as a full-on single parent living on a shoestring than in what she sees as a pretense of a relationship.
Summer days eh!! Will Susie manage to get Tony along to a counselling session so that she can let him know how she feels without his denying that there is a problem? Can anyone open his eyes to how ludicrously selfish he is? Can they put things right? An everyday problem being experienced now in a thousand or more relationships within fi fty miles of where you are sitting… And which will in turn create another generation of men who understand nothing about contributing anything to family life other than money.