School holidays are here so gird your loins because they are going to suck.
One of the most disappointing bait and switches of adulthood is that the summer holidays you used to look forward to as a child are now the stuff of dread. Instead of carefree days at the beach and endless ice-creams, it’s now your responsibility to schedule and facilitate those beach trips, and earn the money that buys those ice-creams.
It gets worse. We’re in another La Niña cycle so those beaches are going to be wet mud, the water will be carrying a slight hint of urban effluent, and due to inflation the ice-creams are now $9.
When I was a child, I remember my parents telling me that I was living the best years of my life. Of course, I never believed them. How could childhood with its oppressive rules and constant subservience to power-drunk authority figures be in any way better than the unbridled self-determination of the adult experience?
As an adult, if you want to go to the movies, you just go. If you want a new bike you just pop down to the shops and get one. Feel like hot chips for dinner? Nothing could be easier. You can do whatever you want. Buy whatever you want. Eat whatever you want.
Now that I bear the weight of parental responsibility myself, I never tell my children that they’re living their Shakespearean salad days. Watching their horror as they find out in real time that adults absolutely cannot do, buy or eat whatever they want may be the only thing that brings me joy in my old age.
These holidays we are swapping a wet Australian summer for a snowy Japanese winter. I have a three-year-old who is yet to meet his grandparents – a product of years of pandemic-interrupted travel that was felt most acutely by international families.
For my children their experience of this holiday will be a nice trip on a plane, movies on an iPad, Christmas presents from the grandparents and a few weeks of effortlessly schussing the mountains of northern Japan by day, and eating delicious food and playing video games by night. That they will also complain loudly about it is a given.
For me and my wife this holiday is months of planning, online meetings on logistics, thousands of dollars that will ultimately not be spent on a new bike for me, mountains of laundry, possibly a crippling injury inflicted by soft snow on old bones, and an uncountable number of exasperated sighs.
And yet, we’ll ultimately love it.
The effort and expense of this holiday won’t be repaid by the single euphoria of fresh tracks in powder on a bluebird day. That immediate moment of joy will instead grow over time, compounding like an investment attracting interest – every time we see a photo from our trip, tell a story that relates to it or flit our minds across a moment we shared as a family. This holiday won’t be measured by three weeks away, but by a literal lifetime of memories.
What my children don’t yet realise is that how we experience life is through the acquisition of memories. They have so few, so how could they see their value?
I appreciate my childhood far more now in memory than I ever did when I was living it. I remember my own dad – who as a single father could barely afford it – used to drive us every year for 12 hours overnight to see snow while he himself hadn’t even slept. I was vaguely aware of the effort at the time, but now I can barely fathom how he did it.
Because of his efforts then, I still remember snow days I had as a child 30 years ago, and I’ll still remember them in 30 more.
I wonder if he sees his investment in the experiences he shared with us as children compounded in us now repeating them with his grandchildren. He should, because that’s what has produced memories that have grown, improved and multiplied across generations.
Adam Liaw is a cook, writer and broadcaster. He has written eight cookbooks and is host of nightly cooking show, The Cook Up, and the podcast, How Taste Changed the World
