Pastries, Photos and Battling Demons
Wanderings Around My Brain While Wandering Around Paris
After some weeks of very stressful passport dalliances1 , I had a very early drive to Dublin airport with my ten year old for our much-awaited trip to Paris together on the October Bank Holiday Monday. It was the first time I’ve ever travelled outside of the country with him on my own for any real amount of time (meeting his Dad on a connecting flight didn’t really count!) so I was quite nervous as to how it would go, even passport stuff aside. The alone time was to be temporary, as my brother and his lovely girlfriend were to join us after two days of a mother-son trip to head to Disneyland Paris, because as well as a crippling fear of heights, I’ve got one of those pesky neck and back injuries that the rollercoasters oh-so-sadly forbid me from being on, and my brother, being a legend, is happy to oblige the rollercoasters. Not being the sole adult on the whole trip is definitely a plus of doing it this way - there is only so much football talk one woman can deal with in 48 hours, and I definitely hit my fill.
We got to explore art museums, try pastries, stand in exceedingly long queues where I lamented my lack of forethought about the queues. The transport system was a revelation - even when it was broken, it was only three minutes late, Dublin you could never. We climbed2 the Eiffel Tower to the tip-top after one such long wait, after viewing it from a height from the Trocadero. My Apple Watch told me I was brilliant several times and probably thought it had been stolen by a far more active person. We got to see paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, and Greek artefacts from a period of history my son is obsessed with, and that was just a brief dip into the art museums of Paris in the 48 hours we had. There were crepes, of course, and hot chocolate, and some ridiculously overpriced bottled water to have with our beignets at the top of the Eiffel Tower. (The price of bottled water in most places shocked me, that and coffee).
My phone is now filled with photographs of a trip well-enjoyed. You can’t hear the “I am really not in any mood to learn more French to understand what they’re saying in A&E” which may have gotten said ten or twenty times when you’ve got an impulsive child who sees no danger (and may have had a near miss of a head-smash-on-Louvre-steps). A Parenting (and ER doctor) Tiktoker who I have followed in recent years, Dr Katie, made a point in a video a few months ago that there is no such thing as a holiday with children, that there are trips, but relaxing holidays are not things that coincide with having to parent in a strange location, where your kid doesn’t have their home comforts that make life that bit easier. I found this to be true, especially since we were on a kind of (self imposed) agenda, of getting to see as many things as possible while also trying not to overstimulate both of us and wind up in some horrible screaming “I hate you” fest before the holiday was over. Thankfully, we didn’t get to that stage, but I did see one woman snapping in Disneyland and felt the inside of my head was very seen.
Am I in many of the photos? Initially no. I’ve done a lot of work on my self image in the last few years, but even so, I have my days (and weeks) of recoiling in horror at photos taken of me because of some dysmorphic thinking that sees the person in the photo as lesser than the person I think I am in my head. The beauty standard in Paris is a much thinner standard than anything I am ever likely to (or even want to) attain to, it just is, but I can’t say that there weren’t horrified thoughts in my head when I looked at the selfies I had taken in front of various things. This isn’t the first trip this has happened to me on, but it is the first one where I caught it in the moment and tried to rectify it. I have been to some incredibly beautiful places in the world, on once in a lifetime trips, and there are scant photos to prove it because in my head, I thought I was too fat and would ruin the photograph. I didn’t like what I saw, and therefore, I wanted there to be no record of it.
This time, I’m a different person from the one I was before, obviously still very imperfect but forcing my way through it. It took a pretty morbid thought to force it - I don’t want my son to be looking for photos of the two of us together doing these things when I am dead and gone, and to be unable to find them because I was too self concious at the time. Yes, that’s dark and twisty and there’s probably a healthier way to do it, but you know, it got me in front of the camera, there are terrible selfies with my son up the Eiffel Tower, on the Batobus we got up the Louvre and in front of the Arc Du Triomphe. In five years time, a different version of me will be looking at those photos and just seeing the smile, and thinking I looked so young and unstressed (that latter one is sheer camera work because I was 99% nervous perspiration through most of the trip).
I tell myself throughout the days in Paris that the women there are so thin because everyone is smoking, and my lungs will thank me for never taking up that habit even if it would have suppressed my appetite. However, a suppressed appetite wouldn’t have thoroughly enjoyed the excellent pastries, the crepes, the very needed glass of wine I got back at our hotel on Tuesday night, and my already asthmatic lungs are happy that it’s something that’s never appealed to me. It strikes me while I’m walking through this city of incredible art that I see myself in a lot of the art - statues of beautiful curvy women, one in particular in the Tuileries Garden by Gaston Lachaise called “Standing Woman”, paintings of barely clothed curvy Rubenesque women. Two very starkly different beauty standards, one in the eye of the artist, the other in the eye of the camera lens. This art, women with stomachs and boobs that don’t fit in easily affordable bras, with bums that maybe aren’t the most pert or even, had to do a real job of speaking to me while I was scooching past most of it with a ten year old boy who was very surprised by how nobody was wearing clothes in any of the statues. But in a city where the women were dressed so chicly, where thin was the name of the game, seeing these alternative beauties did help with shutting down the tiny voice in my head saying I shouldn’t get in front of the camera.
The holiday was a success. Did I come home relaxed? Of course not, I very much need a holiday after it, but that was to be expected. We made memories, I spent more time with my brother than we had since we were teenagers, and it’s an experience I hope my son will remember as a great trip with his Mam for years to come - complete with it’s own Taylor Swift soundtrack to be played in the car on the way home from the airport, and several times in the weeks since then.
Never judge how long a child’s passport renewal will take off how short the turnaround on your own, adult, passport was - it will lead you to a very expensive, very stressful week with several trips in and out of the passport office and Garda stations while you refresh the tracking page in a fervour not experienced since waiting for university exam results.
Using the Lift on the way up - we decided to walk down one of the sets of stairs between floors and very quickly I learned that wasn’t a great idea, but on we kept walking until we got to the next level that had a lift, shaky legs and all!