Tom's blog: Downtime

We're spending half term on holiday in a part of rural France we love and the weather has been unseasonably hot, which left me facing a dilemma this afternoon: Should I pour myself another glass of wine and carry on reading my book in the sun, or haul myself off my sun lounger and play with my 5 year old? On the one hand the book was gripping (Hilary Mantel) and the wine was perfect for a sunny afternoon (it had bubbles, put it that way). On the other hand my son was playing alone on the grass outside our chalet making potions with a bucket of water and just about anything he could lay his hands on (daisies, grass clippings, gravel), and I knew he would have loved me to join in.

To resolve that dilemma I asked myself whether this holiday was for the children's benefit or for mine. It might sound like the answer to that question should be obvious ("holidays are for children: get off your backside and go and play with them"), but I don't think it's as easy as that.

Sometimes, with the best will in the world, we all simply feel too exhausted to bounce around energetically entertaining the children, though of course we feel guilty about it. I've been through a particularly busy spell at work (a lot of travelling with regular 5am starts) and things have been a bit chaotic at home (the kids were ill which, without being too graphic, meant even less sleep and even more laundry than usual), so when we came away we were already pretty shattered. By the time we'd splashed around in the stream and been to the park this morning, cleared up after lunch, put our youngest daughter down for her nap and smothered the other two in sun cream (again), it was just about all I could do to lower myself onto a sun lounger: Getting up again to make potions in a bucket seemed like an awful lot of effort.

Finding some down-time for ourselves is also important for our own health and well-being. I went to some mental health training the other day which suggested getting out into nature as a way to combat stress (to be fair the trainer didn't specifically recommend sitting on a sun lounger with a glass of wine WATCHING nature, but I'm sure that's what she had in mind). If our own health starts to suffer because we don't find effective ways to deal with the stress that comes with our jobs, what use will we be to our children?

So back to my dilemma. What did I do? Well, for all the reasons above, I think I could have sat in the sun for a bit longer without needing to feel too guilty. But you might well guess that, if I'd decided to sit on my backside drinking wine, I probably wouldn't have written a blog about it. I put my book and wine glass down and took my son into the woods to pick wild strawberry flowers to add to his potion, and I loved every minute of it.

Tom is a senior associate in a magic circle law firm. He is married with three children, and works fulltime with one day per week spent working at home.