Being married with kids is perhaps the most stressful and life draining situation to be in. I never was a ‘Family Guy’, well perhaps more like Family Guy’s Peter Griffin rather than a guy with a retirement plan and two kids.
Having two young kids quickly turns your life upside down and your priority list gets fucked. Back when we were a young horny couple, my wife and I used to travel often. Once we got married (and my wife was carrying my daughter) we basically had to stop and we haven’t been on holiday in 5 years. And you can’t really count the last one as a holiday since it was in Paris, and Paris is basically the European version of Detroit but filled with shallow and pedantic assholes.
This year we decided to go to Scotland, the land of scotch. After pressing the ‘Pay Now’ button on the Ryanair website, it hit me… WTF have I done! I will actually be there with my family. The sheer amount of thinking, stress, and preparation hit me like a bag of dicks. My wife and I both had expired passports, and the kids didn’t have one. When I told my wife to apply for a new passport guess what her reply was… ‘I will wait for cooler weather so that my hair will be better’. She also wanted matching fucking suitcases, because hey, why the fuck not? The baggage handlers should have colour coding to slam the shit out of my property!
Anywho, the bureaucracy and sheer amount of work required to get the kids passport done is ludicrous. I mean you need actual printed passport photos, in an era where printed photos have been completely wiped out for the past 15 years. These said photos need to be notarised or signed by someone from the clergy… wait what?
Yeah. Basically a notary, doctor, policeman, or a member of the clergy needs to sign the passport photos and documents for you to get a kids passport. Why you ask?
They act as a witness that the kid is actually yours. So if you kidnap a kid, you can pay a notary to sign the documents and get your passport basically. because at no point was I asked for the birth certificate… And where exactly is the passport office you ask? Well it in the busiest part of Valletta where there is no chance of finding a fucking parking spot, so you have to walk like a motherfucker with your kids from one of the city to the other using the least accessible streets and pavements for prams and wheelchairs. But hey its not like the island is filled with abandoned buildings that could be used for such offices and freeing the capital from traffic and parking issues.
After the passports we had to start thinking of car hire, kids luggage, clothes, food stuffs (most of which can’t go through security), and other useful crap the kids might need to stay entertainment through the 4hr trip, which I assume will be hell on earth.
After all this crap and overthinking, I came to the sudden realisation that this holiday is not actually a holiday after-all. It’s going to be the most stressful 8 days of my life. Made up of constantly telling my kids; Get down from there, put you pants back on, and take that out of your mouth (sentences which I will hopefully not repeat to my daughter when she is 17).
It is then followed with constant fighting with my wife for absolutely no reason, and then looking at a pub or a scotch distillery and sobbing when realising I can’t go in there. I can’t wait for that faithful moment when I have to pass through the security point at the airport and strip down and still make the fucking thing go off. Or being held at the Glasgow airport for a ‘Random’ Bomb residue test… which has nothing to do with the fact that I look middle-eastern.
Moral of the story: Never go on holiday with your family.