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A Good Row
Sue Elliot Nicholls ponders the etiquette of having a row in front of your child...
This summer, yearning for adventure, we decided to hire a car and travel round Crete. It was lovely, as harmonious as you can wish a family holiday to be until...the tent came out. Correction, Tony brought the tent out. Admittedly a tent was packed but somehow I'd seen the tent as a last resort and Tony presumed this was to be a camping holiday.
So, picture the scene, an untouched beach, the only other family there were the sussed and seasoned variety: half an hour after parking up the camper van they're tucking into a three course meal whilst watching the sun go down over the clear blue Mediterranean sea. Then there's us, Tony, sweating away, trying to find some way of getting the tent pegs to stay in the dusty earth for longer than twenty seconds.
"For crying out loud, Sue, hold the guy rope still."
"This is supposed to be a holiday not an army training course."
Then Morgan, who's 3, joins in.
"Look for Christ's sake, I'm playing in the bloody car, all right?"
"Morgan, don't swear."
Before Morgan came along, Tony and I had some real humdingers - tears, tantrums, followed by heavy duty chats until two in the morning. We sustained a happy and healthy relationship that way for years.
Suddenly, bang - baby in the house and throwing each other's clothes out of the window felt like a Ken Loach film. What could we do? We tried just stopping. Then we tried waiting until he'd gone to bed, an obvious solution which I shared with my friends.
"No, no, you can't do that, my parents did that and I'd hear them at night, it was horrific, I'd lay in bed with my duvet over my ears crying and crying..."
Ok, Ok, got the picture.
So now we bicker freely in front of Morgan, maybe even more in an endeavour to stop things blowing up, and somehow it doesn't seem that heavy any more. But we always make up in front of him...reassure him that we do love each other but we all get cross from time to time ...
I can just hear him in 20 years time...
"My parents were always squabbling, they thought by making up in front of me in some hippy dippy way, it would make everything all right, well it didn't. I'm not going to be like that with my kids... no way."
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