Competing for the perfect photo from your holiday
Ben on the banana, Ben with baby camel, Ben at the beach bar. I click on Send. The recipient is the father of the main subject. «Why are you even sending this to him?» asks my holiday acquaintance to my left in the African sand. We look out to sea.
A short break. Yes, why after we've been apart longer than we've ever been together?
I have around five thousand photos of cute, cuddly boys in my photo library.
«There was just WLAN...», I say, in the absence of a real answer. Why do separated parents, who would never (again) voluntarily spend their holidays together, still send each other photos of their children even years after the divorce? From their sacred, private quality holiday time?
I have around five thousand photos of cute, cuddly boys in front of sand buckets, shovels and water wings against a blue sky, on the beach and in the sea in my photo library: both my holiday photos and those of their father. They differ not only in the choice of background motifs.
Meanwhile, my main subject is teenagers with spots and braces. In their absence during the summer holidays with their father, my job as a cleaner and kitchen appliance is on hold. When they're away, I don't cook. I usually go out to eat, there's little to tidy up and I can work without hearing «Mum, I'm hungry» hundreds of times. I'm not constantly tripping over trainers, salami sticks and penguin wrappers, socks and hoodies. And there are no empty milk cartons in the fridge.
Why on earth would I miss my sons? By day three at the latest, with no sign of life, I send a WhatsApp message in the family chat: «And how is Sardinia? So quiet here without you...» The only thing missing was the tear smiley to document the emptiness of my life.
The subsequent flood of images that her father sends from the Mediterranean are somewhat reminiscent of the film «The Talented Mr Ripley». Golden-curled, delicately tanned young men strolling through the dilapidated Italian alleyways in their white polo shirts without chocolate ice cream on their collars. Model boys in front of cultivated food, mussels with rice and salad, sheltered from the sun in the shade, their noses in books.
Perfectly staged photos
Of course, books! Not that my sons don't have books with them on my holidays, we even have a daily compulsory reading lesson. (Honestly!) I find only reading children as a photo motif somehow unspectacular.
So since nerd photos have found their way into our holiday correspondence, I've also been making sure that my holiday photos don't show any red and white fries, chewing gum ice cream or Caspar's peeling shoulder after hours of «bronzage intensif» in shallow salt water. Just one photo of Ben fishing behind a rock with a net prompted me to ask whether I had Ben in my eye all the time.
Each family member has their own way of sending holiday greetings.
Of course, I wrote and thought: If you only knew how many times we've lost him on holiday! How often Ben was brought back to me by the «Guardia Civil» or complete strangers. Once by a lesbian English couple who he had told that his mum had abandoned him! I think they were on the verge of adopting him.
In a recent holiday photo, Ben looked slightly damaged after a night-time disco programme in a club complex. His father wrote that it really didn't look like he was relaxing. What should I say as a mum? Yes, the poor child hardly gets any sleep with me, nothing to eat, but drugs for partying the night away?
Conversely, of course, I have little reason to criticise the summery Rama family in the photos of my children's father. They all seem to be saying to me: «Look here, non-baby, things are going perfectly with us! We're having fun and zero problems...»
Every family member has their own way of sending holiday greetings. Even Caspar, who travelled to Mallorca for the first time last summer with his mates and without his parents. When this red, cross-eyed guy appeared on my mobile phone screen, background: Schinkenstrasse, Ballermann, I thought to myself: «Wow, he almost looks a bit like Caspi. Then I heard: "Digga, are you online, Digga, I'll smack you...» Then another «hiccup» and «Alda, it was mum!» Then the connection was cut.
At first I had to laugh, then I got a little sad. Was this really the same son whose skinny boy's legs were still wearing Bob the Builder shorts, along with fins, a snorkel and diving goggles? With this turquoise cap with Lightning McQueen from «Cars» on the front?
Photo to wrong sender
Ben was barely two, Caspar seven, when the three of us travelled without their father for the first time. Back then, I was still sending him holiday snaps, as if it was my duty, if we were travelling without him, to at least report back every hour. Including little nasty things like random, muscular Latin lovers in the background. However, I also received various burning love messages from my ex during this holiday - only they weren't meant for me, but for his new girlfriend. After all, you can make a mistake when you send something!
When parents are separated for longer than they have ever been together, the phases of emotionally entangled messages are over at some point. We still send each other photos of our children from holiday destinations around the world. When there is WLAN available. And perhaps because holiday pictures are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of separate childhoods that will eventually come together to form one. At the latest at the photo show on the slide projector at their wedding.
