'holiday' depths

Day one: So we got there late the previous day after a long drive and unpacked. Lovely to be in Devon, as ever. Hoping for a long refreshing sleep and less pain due to refreshing sea air.

Instead, my blue eyed boy wakes up at 6am. My pre-pubescent beauty of a daughter shouts at him to go back to sleep. He won't, claiming he has woken up 'feeling like P Diddy' and what is he meant to do about it. I'm in so much pain I can hardly move. On my advice at 6.45am they run upstairs to 'make breakfast', weetabix and milk poured randomly into bowls and sloshed in front of the tv in the cottage i'm trying to keep all neat and tidy and spick and span. Bearing in mind that the drive down nearly killed me I'm finding it hard to surface. When we all do, it is raining. We manage a quick walk on the beach and a pub lunch intersperced with my seven trips to the toilet then go back to play board games.

Day two: It is beautiful sunshine. We make it to the beautiful beach and the kids play in the sea and blue eyed boy catches shrimps and shows them to me in wonder. Beautiful wild daughter on her body board in the waves for hours. I have managed to carry a deck chair down the path and I sit in it reading my PD James book. It's the closest I've come to peace for a while.

Day three: More fights and squabbles in the morning. More stomping above my head (it was an 'upside down' cottage, so my room underneath the living room). More shouting. More worrying that the landlady next door running the adjacent B&B will ask us to leave. So we go out, me taking double the amount of painkillers that I should, we go to a local little town and buy a few things, we go to another beach, it should be nice , but the day is overshadowed by emotional clouds and we're all tetchy. Kids won't settle to anything; everything is wrong.

Day four: We go to a working farm nearby, which the kids usually love. We've had idyllic days there before. And this wasn't bad. Baby rabbits, goats, mice; miniature pigs; ferret racing; meet the hedgehogs (not top of my list, but the kids liked it); a little train; tractor rides..... Pond dipping at the end of the day and then my lovely girl tips my lovely boy's bucket of pond debris back into the pond because she is angry with him. More shouting. I walk out, straight through the shop; not a popular decision. I feel unbearably sad.

Day five: I decide I can't get to day seven like this. There is just too much noise and stress and without another adult there and with so little energy I'm just failing to manage. I spend the morning packing up and cleaning the cottage. Blue eyed boy helps me a bit when he feels like being strong and carrying bags to the car; pre-pubescent beauty mostly lies on the floor, kicking her gangly legs in the air, reading a complicated Guardian article about the pros and cons of Fracking. We go to say 'goodbye' to the sea but end up staying all afternoon. I even end up in the water. and here I am not in pain. Magically. I look out and all I want to do is keep swimming, outwards, beyond the boats further out in the bay, towards the horizon; keep on swimming until I am too tired and I slowly sink to the mermaids. 'Mummy', calls my little son. 'You too deep. Come back!'. I don't want to come back, but I do.

We arrive home at 11pm. I stop to sleep in a layby for an hour on the way and drink a bottle of coke bound to cause me immense bladder pain the next day as simply cannot stay awake. I carry my two sleeping beauties into their beds and tuck them in. It takes me til 1am to unload the car.

Day six: Sleep. Unpack. Daddy number 2 comes to pick up Blue Eyed Boy and is remarkably and uncharacteristically civil, nice and sympathetic. My lovely friend comes over bringing me flowers to talk about doing some childminding work for me despite having just got a full-time job til Christmas. Feel extremely grateful and loving towards her.

Day seven: Sleep. Play boggle and 'the shakespeare game'. Help my girl with her maths, Non verbal reasoning and music. Talk at length with my stormy soulmate about his various dramas and our possible routes forwards sideways or round in circles. Tell him I love him and listen to him repeating the same and wonder if it will ever be enough.

Lie in bed drinking valerian tea and thanking God the day is over. Take more painkillers. Take more tranquilisers. Wonder how I will get through tomorrow.