License to Ill: The Summer Weekend Road Trip

by Corinne Purtill

For each of the two summers we’ve lived in England, my husband and I have taken a weekend road trip to the countryside with our daughter. We do this because we sometimes forget ourselves and start to believe that we are normal people – civilians, if you will – and not parents.  We need this weekend road trip to remind us that this is not so.

Our daughter was five months old when we picked up the rental car last year to drive to a hotel in the Cotswolds. Those were not easy days. We had just moved for the second time in three months. We were still trying to pretend that the sour-musk smell in our new apartment would eventually go away. We were tired. This was our first official “vacation” with the baby. We still believed that stress was something we could pack up and get away from for the weekend, not something we now carried in our DNA and in a plastic Graco car seat.

The problems started at rental car pick-up. Our directions suggested that we drive through the center of London, on a Friday, at rush hour. This struck both of us as somehow the other’s fault. A travel tip: If a discussion about directions between two people in a relationship lasts for longer than 45 seconds, it is no longer about directions. It is about How you never listen, and Why you always do this, and How this is just like that time at Ikea. All the ads on Google Maps should be for marriage counselors. We got lost in London, and then we got lost in Oxfordshire, and then the baby screamed all night, and it took a full 24 hours before either of us uttered a civil word to each other. We returned home defeated, each of us quietly nursing the sinking feeling that we were never going to have a good time together again.

One year later, we were sat again in London traffic in another rental car heading for another weekend in the Oxfordshire countryside. Several significant changes have occurred in the intervening year. The baby is now a toddler who (usually) sleeps all night. We are no longer chronically exhausted and short-tempered. (We have also moved to a stench-free apartment.) We were spending the weekend with friends who don’t have kids, resulting in an advantageous 7:1 adult-to-child ratio. A friend was driving, a face- and marriage-saving arrangement for everyone.

Before we left the house I fed, bathed and dressed Lily in her pajamas, a superstitious ritual meant to ensure that she would sleep as soon as I put her down in the rear-facing car seat she is rapidly outgrowing. Of course she could not sleep in the car. Cars are a huge treat for her, and she was just so busy. She needed to watch the traffic, then play with her rabbit, then say “All done!” and attempt to unbuckle her car seat, then shout angrily when she had to go back in the car seat, then eat a breadstick, then play with the car seat sunshade, then sing “Wind the Bobbin Up” several times in a row. This was before we’d left greater London. London’s ring roads and motorways are all designed for use by no more than four cars at any given time. Friday evening traffic on a summer weekend – even a summer of endless rain, like this one – is slow. It started to rain. Things got slower. By 8 p.m., the hour we thought we’d arrive at the house, we’d barely left the city limits.

Lily stayed awake the whole time, mostly chatty, sometimes fussy, but without any signs of the meltdown that traveling parents dread. By 10 p.m. we were less than 20 miles away from the house. She was eating a tortilla chip. A piece got stuck in her throat. She coughed. She coughed again. Then she threw up, everywhere.

There was no stopping it once it started. She threw up four times in a row, an automatic assault of meals, drinks and snacks dating back hours. I managed to undo her straps and get her upright so she wouldn’t choke, then sat quietly acting as a human shield between a jet stream of sick and the rental car deposit.

We pulled off the highway and into a grassy lane leading onto some farmland. Justin and I stripped off her dirty jammies and cleaned her and the car as best we could with a half-pack of baby wipes. The driver bolted from the car and stood a few paces facing the fields, quietly gulping in fresh air and frantically tapping something on his iPhone. Probably scheduling a vasectomy or ordering a lifetime supply of condoms. Occasionally we’d look up and say “Sorry,” and he’d say “That’s okay!” in a too-high, too-fast voice that clearly said I will remember this horror until the day I die. Justin was disgusted. I think moms have a different relationship to their child’s excretions. Like yes, in a perfect world there would be economic equality and less carbon in the atmosphere and no regurgitated yogurt in my hair. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Cleaning barf off a Ford Mondeo really hammers that point home.

We rode the rest of the way in silence, in a reeking car, pulling into the house two and a half hours later than we intended and with another hour of scrubbing, bathing, airing and showering to come. But here is the difference. Last year, we spent the whole weekend waiting to feel like we used to feel on vacations before the baby came around, and then sniping at each other to cover up how disappointed we were that things were no longer the same. This year, we finished cleaning up the mess and went on to enjoy ourselves. We’ve wised up. We no longer expect to get away from it all. It’s good enough just to wrap up the life we have – mess and all – and take it on the road.