We arrive in plenty of time for our flight home. “Thank God I remembered the passports,” I say jubilantly, as the entrance doors to the airport swoosh open. The check-in desks are eerily quiet. I look up at the departures board and our flight is not there. I look at my daughter, who has already sussed out, from the look on my face, that something is wrong. I have remembered everything apart from the correct date. Today is not, as I had thought, tomorrow.
“Twelve hundred pounds sterling to fly today,” the woman at the information desk says, briefly looking up from her computer screen to let me know – with expert raised-eyebrow, schoolma’am superiority – that she would never get the day wrong for anything.
My daughter looks at me with eyes that could scorch the sun. “I have plans tonight, and you’ve ruined them. What a moron.”
I tell her that yes, I have messed up, but that the people we should feel most sorry for are my parents because they have just said goodbye to us. They are probably putting their feet up, saying, “Thank Christ they’ve gone!”
As we heft bags back on to the trolley, a kindly woman in the queue says: “Go and eat steaks, drink champagne and come back tomorrow.”
But for some reason, the YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE IDIOT voice inside me kicks in. It is not my daughter being mean. It is not the lady with the officious manner either. It’s just that there is something rather shameful about having to call my parents to let them know – that although we left two hours ago and the beds have been stripped in celebration – we are returning.
It is certainly not a disaster, but I feel like a muttonhead who can’t even get the day right. The mistake makes me think of all the other times I’ve messed up. The catastrophic errors are rarely the things that have the power to make me feel wretched; it’s the small things that trigger erroneous thoughts that make me think unkind things about myself.
My mother stops me feeling so bad as soon as she returns to pick us up. “Let’s open some champagne later. I’m sure the airline leaves out the date on the boarding passes because they want people to fuck up.”
“Don’t worry, darling,” says my father as he hugs me later, a reminder that he has changed beyond recognition. He used to lack empathy and might have said nothing or: “How could you have not checked the day?”
I call R and he thinks it’s hilarious. “Like when you booked a whole holiday with the departure and return destinations the wrong way round.”
Luckily, I’m surrounded by kind people.
“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind,” is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s finest quotes, a straightforward sentiment for a better life. I think of kindness when I want my younger children to stop hitting each other. I think of it when I wish my daughter would realise how if she were kinder to herself then she would be nicer to others. But then I cast my mind back to my teen years. I was furious with everyone and everything and couldn’t think how to behave kindly at all.
Perhaps kindness has to be practised on one’s self first. When I mess up now, I feel a jolt of panic and all my past failures appear in my mind, causing unease. And for a split second I realise how R feels when he relapses.
But I reassure myself that everyone has flaws, and that vituperous self-damnation will lead to nowhere good or helpful, and I feel better. I try to stop the domino-effect negative thoughts by thinking of how things could be better, or worse. Either helps.
It surprises me to say that R and I are mostly kind to each other now. I never thought it could happen. Not so long ago we were like Mr and Mrs Twit. We bickered and behaved unkindly, especially if we were feeling rotten and wanted to spread the hurt.
Of course, I still shout at R for smoking fags up the chimney and using cups as ashtrays, and he raves at me for being terrified to check my bank balance. But I don’t endlessly berate him for his problems with drink and he doesn’t needle away at my apparent failures, perceived or real. These are our foibles, and we feel bad enough about them without anyone else pointing them out to us. But we realise they do not now have the power to ruin a life, or even a day.
