We were at my sister-in-law’s barbecue, sitting out in the garden, grilling sausages and lamb, the whole scene staged like a postcard of suburban bliss. Then my brother-in-law sidled over, eyes misty, and said, “Look at the children playing. This—this is happiness.”
I nearly rolled my eyes into the grill. Because five minutes later those very cherubs were shrieking, clawing, and battering each other senseless, followed by thirty minutes of their mother lecturing them at full volume. Five minutes of bliss, thirty minutes of migraine. If this is happiness, darling, then the maths is brutal. And of course, there were more headaches to come—because there always are. So perhaps, just perhaps, let’s not romanticise chaos as though it were a symphony.
Fast forward a fortnight: the family goes on holiday. My brother-in-law returns home early, declaring he must savour the quiet because three days without the children is already hard enough—now he has two weeks of solitude, and he’s ecstatic.
Excuse me? Who was it, exactly, that insisted to me a fortnight earlier that “watching the children play is happiness”? You don’t get to deliver Hallmark lines about parental joy and then pivot to me-time is paradise. Pick a narrative, darling.
Because here’s the unvarnished truth: the real parent in that household is my sister-in-law. She does the refereeing, the disciplining, the endless emotional labour. My brother-in-law? He’s a technicality—a half-parent. Present by virtue of sperm and shared roof, but absent when it comes to the heavy lifting. In reality, it’s one parent at full capacity, and one coasting at 0.5, borrowing language he hasn’t earned.
So no, you don’t get to romanticise. Not when someone else is carrying the weight while you sip the quiet.