Spain Dad, a baby blog

The woman in front of us was holding her sleeping daughter in her arms. Her husband was in front of her pulling their luggage and pushing a stroller with a sleeping baby through the herd of backpackers and the men picketing with their signs for hotels and cars for hire and wine tours and excursions to the top of the volcano.

I was relieved when the family pointed at the sign with the name of our hotel written on it and pushed their way over to talk to the man with the sign. I was relieved because I could follow them through this mess of people, and as the woman glanced behind and smiled at Alleke riding on my back, to know that we had something in common in this strange place, which after eight hours on a ferry boat, seemed so clearly separated from any other place I had ever been.

We piled into a van, and I slid the window open as far as it could go so that we could feel the warm breeze from the Mediterranean on our faces as we darted up the side of the cliff like a gecko on a wall to the village above.

I watched the hotel owner show the family to their room down the hall before we disappeared into ours. I threw our suitcases on the bed, opened them, and already April was in the bathroom putting our things away and asking if I would run down to the store and buy some water since we couldn’t drink the water on the island, and she would put Alleke in her swimming suit and take her down to the swimming pool since Alleke had been singing ballads about her “hotel with a swimming pool” for days.

Later I pushed open the gate to the swimming pool with a gyro sandwich in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. I sat down on one of the lawn chairs next to the pool and ate my sandwich and drank a beer while I watched April making tractor noises and dragging Alleke around in circles in her inflatable pool ring.

The woman who had ridden in the van with us stepped out of the hotel room at the end of the pool. She was in her swimming suit. She walked to the edge of the pool and dove in. Her husband appeared with a towel over his shoulder. He left the door to their hotel room open, tossed his towel on a chair, and dove in after her.

I watched him glide across the bottom of the pool, his body lurking silently below the water as he came up under his wife. She began shrieking with laughter and splashing around as he grabbed at her heels, until eventually he came up for air, gasping for breath and shouting victory.

They could have been 7th-graders, even more convincingly for the way she grabbed him then around the neck and kissed him. I envied them for being young–not in years, but in spirit–defiant of the truth that they were busy parents worn out by two little kids at the end of a long family vacation. They made it look so easy.

I envied them even more that evening as we sat at an expensive restaurant at the edge of the sea as the sun went down, and Alleke shivered in her chair and cried, and we fretted over her until our food was cold.

As we waited for the bill, I watched the waiter wisk past us balancing plates all the way up both arms. I wondered why it was never easy for me to balance being a dad and a husband at the same time. I didn’t like knowing that romance could come so easily for other couples with kids. They could just arrive at a hotel, dump their kids on the bed, leave their responsibilities hanging on the chair at the edge of the pool with their towels, walk to the edge of paradise together, and dive in.