Warning: holidays may be bad for your health.

I'm going to give up going on  holiday.

I am going to sit here, stay here, and not go away ever again.

It's not because I don't have a lovely time.  Quite the contrary.

B and I spent this weekend in the Lake District.  We rented a fabulous, fabulous house (where friends of ours spent the first few nights of their honeymoon many moons ago. We even rented a silver Corsa to get there, which  made us feel even more nostalgic for those same halcyon days). We walked up hills.  We sat in pubs (it was raining, ok?).  We ate and drank lovely food.  We pottered around markets. We spent lots of quality time together (ahem). I even managed to have two baths.  That's more than I think I've ever had in this house.

The children (and my parents-in-law) stayed here.  

It was utterly wonderful from start to finish.

We got back yesterday afternoon, after a detour to see our new nephew (hooray!), and since then I have been unbearable.  I know this, because B has gone out.

I have been grumpy, and impatient, and simmeringly, irritatedly cross.  The weight of the world is sitting on my shoulders. Nothing anyone can do for me is good enough and everywhere I look things are accusing me: do me says the laundry, iron me says last week's laundry. Dry me says the teetering pile on the draining rack.  Fix me says the pin board I bought in a junk shop in Cockermouth, full of crafty inspiration, and now empty of time and energy to use it. The fridge cries Fill me and the week's meals say plan us. The emails I've ignored flash read me.  Deal with us say my work files.  Everywhere I look something else cries tidy me. Play with us whine the children and talk to me, the husband.

And I think  Stop the world! Stop my life! I don't want to do any of it any more.

And it's all the holiday's fault.  Because the holiday was a break from my life: which makes my life somewhere I don't want to be.  Even though, I know, I have an incredibly blessed and lucky life all told. 

Yet a holiday, and it was true of this one, and also, astonishingly, of our last family holiday, all six of us driving two thousand miles to France and back, makes no demands on me.  I wake up in the morning with nothing on the to-do list, whether that be lovely things to do (ring an old friend) or dull ones (fill in the tax return), and that emptiness is liberating.  That freedom is soul-lifting.  And so the return to real life feels heavy, as I though am weighted down again, however enjoyable the things I have to do may actually be.

I find myself yearning for another life.  On our return from France I found myself breaking down in tears and screaming for it:  how different it would have been had we not moved/moved somewhere different/if I did another job/ if B did another job/ if we won the lottery/if I were a better parent, and yet, of course, that life would be the same, because even in the Lake District, France or Outer Mongolia, washing has to be done, meals have to be planned and talking to friends remains one of life's great pleasures.

Getting grumpy with my life for being a life, my life, gets me nowhere.  But it doesn't stop me doing it.

I am hoping that writing about it will help.  Failing that I'll just have to stop going on holiday.

I don't want to go.

Ok.  First off, I'm a spoilt brat.  Clearly I want to go.  Clearly I am a very lucky girl who has a very lovely husband who spoils her rotten.  Clearly I should be jumping for joy with excitement.  But....

...On Tuesday, L and I, courtesy of her best friend moving there, B having a load of air miles that he's uninvited and un-hinted-at offered to us, and a pair of very loving and tolerant grannies, are off to Singapore for six days.  A and S are staying here.   They will be looked after very capably by B and his mother for the first four days, then he'll take them down South and my mother will take over the granny role for the last two days, before we get collected from Heathrow on the following Monday.  They couldn't be in better hands.

It's a minimum of 26 degrees in Singapore.  It is clean. It is tidy. We have free accommodation with utterly lovely people (and I'd be calling them that even if they weren't putting us up).  We can swim, and potter, and shop.  I will have only one child to look after, and someone else will be cooking for her.

But. 

While I am looking after my one child, my babies, my tiny, defenceless, two-year-old, obstinate, stroppy, wonderful babies, are going to be a million* miles away.  What if something happens?  What if something happens to one of them and I can't get back? What if something happens to me, and I never get back? There are planes, and motorways, and icy roads, and illnesses, and accidents of unimaginable kinds to contend with.  What am I thinking leaving them for so long to go so far away?

A, in particular, is not making this easier.  I think she knows.  She's at that stage where she understands a lot more than she can say, and I think she knows.  I think she realises I'm going and I'm certain she doesn't want me to.  For the first time ever, I'm having to sit in their room with them until she falls asleep because she won't let me leave (and now she's capable of climbing out of the cot - and I don't think it's fair to take the sides off and then leave them with other people for a week - I can't leave until I know she's not going to take a nosedive).

I actually tried to explain to her tonight.  I sat and I stroked her hand through the bars, and I told her I was going away but that I would not be gone long and I would do everything I can to be back to her soon.  And I find myself thinking, again, so that I bore myself and can't sleep: "But what if I can't? What if I'm not?"

And I know, I really do, that as soon as we're on that plane, and L, who is beside herself with excitement, has settled down with her own private telly, and I have a book, or a mindless movie, and the anticipation of all the wonderfulness ahead, that it will be ok.  That it will be more than ok.  I suspect that this may end up being L's first memory that she takes with her into adulthood, and I hope it's going to be a wonderful one. I'm determined to make it a wonderful one.  It's our girls' adventure, and we've been planning it for months. We are so very lucky.

But there's still a very big part of me that wishes we weren't going at all.



* Please note, distances may not be geographically accurate, but emotionally they're spot on.