Comfort zone
Spike's first taste of international travel was to Morocco on the occasion of our honeymoon. He was a year old.
A memory persists.
I am walking through a souk with Spike in my arms and he is livid and inconsolable. We move past crowded alcoves arrayed with a disorderly rainbow of babouches, glinting lanterns, tagines, carpets, leather bags, local fruits and vegetables and heaping piles of earthy spices. The heat is pressing in on us; a solid, slippery thing. I feel like I could cut it with a butter knife. The noise, rich smells and visual abundance of the souk have blurred into irrelevance because I am wholly focused on Spike and his distress. I become aware of the rise and fall of arms reaching out to us as we pass by. Compassionate local women with sympathetic smiles hold out their hands, offering to help settle my disconsolate boy. The collective effect of their gestures resembles some kind of well-meaning maternal honour guard. I am both touched, and distraught at my obvious inability to console my own child.
Spike was overwhelmed by Marrakech. Besides his wild dislike of the souks which he thrashed and scrambled to escape as if he were a cat avoiding a bath, it was also difficult to keep him cool, even in the shady idyll of our riad. It seemed that the heat had blown his internal thermostat when we stepped off the plane and now homeostasis was off the table.
Later, on an all-inclusive holiday to Portugal, Spike could not tolerate the clamour of the hotel dining room so we wrapped food in napkins for him to eat somewhere more conducive. Innocuous but unexpected splashing in the hotel pool terrified him and he clung to us like a damp koala. In Paris, unmoored from his usual routines, Spike seemed frequently on the edge of fight or flight. We managed on all these trips but I had a sense that he was coping less well with each subsequent journey rather than better and that we had been lucky to avoid more overtly difficult times. We were firefighting with little time to enjoy being on holiday. A change was not as good as a rest, it seemed.
We decided that our next holiday would be in the U.K. Ironically, that holiday was our most difficult yet, with Spike physically / psychically stuck and unable to get out of the car when we arrived at our holiday home in the New Forest. We managed to extricate him over the course of two hours in the same way you might gain the trust of a timid woodland creature: low voices, no sudden movements and a trail of tempting snacks and objects leading from the car to our accommodation. We spent the next day moving between the trampoline in the garden, a rope swing and a blanket on the sunny lawn, letting Spike acclimatise to his surroundings. He was happy enough. In the days that followed, our grand plans to explore the local area unravelled when Spike refused to get in the car. He had designated the holiday home a zone of safety and we were not free to leave: I briefly wondered whether we would be on holiday forever. On our last day, we got up early. Bodily bundling Spike into the car and getting the hell out of Dodge (or Hampshire) would feel too much like a traumatic kidnapping so we allowed time for a more playful, painstaking approach, intuiting that it was more likely to lead to future successful holidays.
While Spike found it hard being away from home, whether in the U.K. or abroad, our time in the New Forest showed that Ben and I felt more relaxed and better equipped to deal with the challenges on home turf. Over the years that followed, we stuck to the UK, tweaking our holiday plans and observing how things unfolded. Things improved year on year as we refined and honed our plans and preparations.
I have always felt enormous well-being on Britain’s beaches so I was content to holiday close to home (in the words of an unexpectedly aphoristic greeting card that I love, I don’t go to church. I don’t go to the gym. But I do go to the seaside). I like standing on the edge of our island, ankle-deep in cold water with the tinny racket of the arcade in my ears. I like peering in limpid pools between jagged rocks and rummaging for fossils among smooth, buff-toned pebbles. It helped that I had done my fair-share of travelling overseas before I had children and, as the son of travel agents, there aren’t many places Ben hasn’t been. We weren’t missing out.
As Spike grew older and more able to cope with change, international travel seemed a logical extension of his love of trains and being on the move. It was also exciting to consider indulging Oz’s intense curiosity about almost everything by exposing him to the world beyond the U.K. This summer felt like the right time to spread our wings. We decided on Brussels, not through any deep-seated desire to go specifically there (no offence, Brussels) but because it met our extensive list of criteria. We could get there by train. Easy. It was an opportunity to negotiate security checks and passport control without also having to face the whole I’m in a tin can in the sky! aspect of plane travel. It was a city in northern Europe which meant it would be cooler than other countries on the continent which were experiencing, frankly, unacceptable temperatures in the 40s. A city destination would limit culture shock for our urban boys and meant there was plentiful transport for Spike to oogle. English would be widely spoken and understood there and, critically, it would be easy to find chips and apple juice!
Spike had literally been counting down the days to the holiday, remarking “[Insert number] of days until we go to Brussels” each day. He was excited and read the not-really-a-social-story about Brussels that I had prepared several times, enthusiastically. He took to recounting his previous international travels (none of which he could remember), “When I was one, I went to Morocco. When I was two, I went to Portugal. When I was three, I went to France. And now I am going to Belgium.” He was also clearly nervous, particularly about staying overnight in a different country.
Oz had also been anxious about the trip, not because of the travel or foreign element but because he is old enough to be cognisant of how difficult Spike can find this sort of thing, and he is aware of how badly wrong it could go and how stressful that would be for all of us. I did my best to emphasise our meticulous planning but the prospect of Spike having a meltdown in a security-sensitive area was, perhaps, difficult to put out of mind. It certainly loomed large in mine.
On the morning of our departure, Spike vacillated noisily. Excitement and anxiety were warring in him. He was keen to get going and feeling adventurous but also instructing us to reassure him with the script, “It ain’t going nowhere”, to affirm that our home would still be here when we returned (always a worry for him, where out of sight can mean not out of mind but out of existence). Spike’s mood made a substantial shift towards anxiety once we reached St Pancras. Here, he tried to engage us in kidnap role play, wrapping our arms firmly around him and telling us, “You must kidnap me!” I discouraged this, imagining over-diligent members of the authorities deciding to make further enquiries. But it was clear that Spike was signalling that the transition from one country to another was a hard thing and he wanted the responsibility for that to be on our shoulders. He wanted to be the un/willing victim if anything should go wrong.
We had booked assistance at St Pancras International and that was a good decision. The queues were long and the area before the security checks was oppressive with low ceilings and the queue folded up on itself many times. I forgot how palpable stress is in these liminal zones. You could almost taste the tang of cortisol in the air. I am certain Spike’s anxiety would have spiralled without the fast track. Once our bags and passports had been checked, we ate sandwiches and boarded the train without incident.
We were probably not the most popular passengers on the Eurostar with our seat hopping and Spike’s loud and relentless verbal stimming. At the same time, I was marvelling at how well he was managing. It’s true that Spike’s refrain for most of the UK leg of the trip was “I’m going to die,” stated quite matter of factly, which probably didn’t make it any less unsettling for our fellow travellers to overhear. These words were, I think, less a statement of imminent fact and more a reflection of the emotional turbulence he was feeling. As we emerged from the Channel Tunnel into daylight and France, he announced, “…and I’m dead.” In Spikeland, we appeared to be holidaying in the Underworld.
As our early experience in the New Forest and subsequent holidays demonstrated, Spike dealt with the challenging nature of staying overnight away from home by mentally moving house and adopting our temporary accommodation as his home. These mental gymnastics meant he was often as troubled to leave our rental as he was to go on holiday in the first place. This time, his coping strategies were a little different. For the first day or two, Spike manipulated the calendars on our devices so that they remained on the date of our departure: a neat digital workaround designed to circumvent his self-imposed ‘no staying overnight away from home’ rule. It seemed to help and, a few days in, he was comfortable enough to abandon the trick. However, as we moved into the last couple of days of our holiday, Spike began to feel sad about leaving Brussels and petitioned us intensely to return immediately. Overall, though, his state of mind seemed further from his previous acute reverse homesickness and closer to a more familiar melancholy that accompanies departing a place one has enjoyed. It was good to see that leaving had become a less wrenching experience for him.
Spike unequivocally enjoyed the holiday and he was, on the whole, relaxed for the entire time we were away. He liked the house we stayed in (bigger and tidier than ours). He enjoyed the preponderance of frites, and was at home in the many trams and trains that took us places. He was engaged and interested in our visits to Brussels’ Atomium and Train World, too.
I am happy for Oz who has not travelled internationally since he was 6 months old. His concerns about our family causing some kind of international incident were cast aside and he quickly became a connoisseur of Belgian frites, cured meats and other delicacies. He gained confidence from seeing his father (the travel agents’ son) in his element and enjoyed soaking up the vibes of a new city. Brussels, in my opinion, is ordinarily more of a long weekend kind of destination, but the longer break meant we were able to space out our activities and build in plenty of recovery time, which at least three of us needed.
While Spike was anxious and hyper-aroused on the journey home, it was a more relaxed affair (relatively speaking) than our outward travels. He was very stimmy but it never felt like his dysregulation would escalate and he was mainly intent on getting through his carefully curated list of videos. I managed to finish my book which felt like a tiny miracle. I was still worried about the transition home which had, historically, been quite difficult for Spike but he had a final surprise for us. Arriving at St Pancras, he hopped lightly off the train and marched on ahead asking, “Where’s the sortie?” Three words which, along with the manner of their delivery, somehow encapsulated everything he had learned about travelling.
