End of the holidays: Crash into everyday life

I hate coming back from a family holiday. All it takes is that one day of leaving and arriving home and my whole holiday effect collapses like a freshly baked soufflé in the fridge. Poof, all the relaxation is gone!
No matter how nice and relaxed we had it on the beach or in the mountains. On the contrary, our Murphy's Law of holidays is: the more beautiful the holiday, the more spectacular our fall into everyday life.

It starts when we're packing for the journey home: no one wants to go, everyone suddenly has urgent plans. Dad needs more than an hour to pay the bill. Or until I storm off like a fighting hen, find him in the hotel bar and untie him. The girls mumble something about «saying goodbye to girlfriends» and simply disappear. The teenage son seems to have had parts of his brain paralysed by the sun: He manages to beat all his mates in Fortnite , but he can no longer follow simple instructions such as «put clothes in suitcase».

Open sesame, close suitcase!

Our clothes must have stretched out during the holiday like those mini sponge rolls that suddenly turn into a whole towel. Maybe there's also too much sand stuck to our clothes. What is certainly not true is my husband's claim that we have been shopping too much again. In any case, the damn suitcases won't close.

Outside, the shuttle bus is already honking while one child still has to hurry. Another turns white-green-greyish after a few minutes on the bus. Later on in the aeroplane during the turbulence, he gets sick for the second time. Whereupon the teen rants: «Ey, you're so embarrassing in every situation, there's nowhere to go with you!»
Hours later, we're standing at the baggage carousel with a grumpy teen, a crying child and a puking child until our suitcases are the last to arrive. Held together with adhesive tape, they probably exploded on the way. They were just a tiny bit too full.

Only people can sit together in a confined space, according to a behavioural scientist. She hasn't been in the car with us yet.

By the way: travelling by car is no better. A behavioural scientist once enthused that only we humans, with our highly developed social skills, could manage to stay together in the smallest of spaces. Monkeys would kill each other.
Then we must be monkeys. I could kill my husband in the car because all he wants to do is eat kilometres in silence and leave the whole «Mummy, I'm hungry / I have to pee / I want the iPad / when are we going to get there / I feel sick ...» circus to me all by myself. My husband could kill me because I can't cope with his new app and have steered us straight into the biggest traffic jam. The children basically kill each other anyway.

Nasty surprises follow at home

At some point we'll finally be home with our monster suitcases. Home sweet home, happiness alone? If only the irrigation had worked, our garden looks like a tobacco plantation . Or the mail diversion - the paper spills out of our letterbox and spreads across the front garden like the Flodder family.
Once inside, we discover more nice welcome surprises: The toilet that a child hasn't flushed in the stress of departure, which is why it smells like a predator's enclosure. The adorable large family of ants that find it really cosy in our kitchen. The grey, furry pile in the pantry that we can only guess whether it used to be apples or pears.

Of course, we don't puzzle about it, but argue about who should have seen it. My husband thinks it's definitely me, because he was busy loading the car, looking for passports and doing all the important things before we left. I then go up and shout that I'm probably not responsible for everything that he doesn't think is important at the moment! He could take his chauvinistic bullshit anywhere else ... then we notice that our neighbour is standing at the open door with a registered letter, which she had kindly accepted.

We continue working in icy silence. My husband is lugging suitcases weighing tonnes and mumbling something about spinal discs. I start one damn washing machine after another and mutter something about housewife slavery .

We wanted to bring our holiday selves home with us. And not just dirty laundry.

And yet we had planned everything so differently on holiday, just yesterday - what felt like three weeks ago. We wanted to come home, not get upset about anything, not tackle anything straight away and get rid of it. We wanted to sit down on the terrace, have a cold beer, turn on some holiday music and really enjoy our holiday together. We finally wanted to be on top of things and bring our relaxed, laid-back holiday selves home instead of just dirty laundry.

Now the washing machine is giving up the ghost. There was probably really too much sand in the clothes. Or it can't cope with the drastic change from holiday to full steam ahead any more than we can. «I've become such a fucking spitfire,» I cry. My husband suddenly stands in the doorway and takes me in his arms. «Don't always stress about nothing, Mum,» says my teenage son and opens the filter. Where did he learn that? Is that something you learn in Fortnite? «Look, we've got blackberries,» shout the girls from the garden.

And then we're sitting in the grass, two berry-stained children, a proud teenager, my husband and me. The sun is shining, not as warm as on holiday, but still. We are at home. We leave the damn laundry to be laundry, the suitcases in the hallway and decide to order pizza.
After all, it's still officially a holiday. It's actually a really nice holiday. The only thing we still have to learn is how to get home without completely crashing. Hopefully we can, because we're not monkeys.

More articles from Ulrike Légé

• A holiday all to yourselfwhile the family is away. Is that possible? And how does it feel? Ulrike Légé has tried it out.
• Ulrike Légé's husband dreams of intelligent sockets. She herself would rather automate completely different things in the house.