One word is the answer to my daughter’s car-sickness … and everything else | Séamas O'Reilly

‘A perpetual holiday,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘is a good working definition of hell.’ I don’t know if that titan of Irish literature had my two-year-old daughter’s car-sickness in mind, but if he did, he might have been on to something.

Regular readers may remember me mentioning her vehicular vomiting before. Many of you – more, in fact, than I could possibly have anticipated – were good enough to contact me with all manner of remedies, suggesting everything from anti-nausea bracelets to antihistamine solutions and precise calibrations of air-conditioning and window tilt. These were, truly, gratefully received, but in the end the best advice, offered on innumerable occasions, was to reduce all visual stimulus. No books, screens or fiddly games for her to play from her car seat – in short, none of the distractions which otherwise keep a toddler from screaming with boredom during the seven-hour drive that ferry travel entails.

And yet, somehow, we have managed the last three or four long-haul trips entirely vomit-free, primarily by incepting her with the idea that this, the journey itself, is a thing of joy and wonder. It is a ‘holiday’, and any invocation of that sacred word magically dispels the arduous longueurs of car travel. If she cries, we say ‘Holiday!’, and put on Baby Shark. If she moans or struggles with her straps, we say ‘Holiday!’ and point out each of the cows or seascapes we pass.

We’ve managed a few trips vomit-free, primarily by incepting her with the idea that the journey is a thing of joy

Soon, it became her watchword for every situation, an injunction to live outside herself in any context, inside or outside a vehicle. She first debuted this mantra while sitting at the summit of a just-too-high slide in Wexford. She grimaced a bit, folding her arms with pensive alarm. ‘Holiday?’ she sighed. ‘Holiday!’ I replied, with as much warmth as I could. She exhaled with determination, crumpled her face into a smile, and propelled herself down its length with athletic élan. Later, upon entering, grim-faced, a crowded ball pit filled with unfamiliar children, all I had to say was ‘holiday’ and she pummelled herself stairward, elbowing strangers in her haste to carpe her little diem.

After years of relating parenting dilemmas, navigating the various missteps and learned lessons, the attempts at moulding my children into patterns of behaviour or, more regularly, cataloguing the degree to which I’ve merely adapted my own brain and schedule to their whims, it’s odd to find myself saying that so many have now been solved by a single word. I am reduced to recommending a tactic as preposterous, and effective, as a magic spell. A spell so strong, incidentally, that it has persisted even since we’ve returned.

Come Monday, and her return to nursery, she happily donned her Baby Shark backpack for the walk, evidently clear that she was back to the everyday grind. ‘Holiday?’ she repeated as we got closer to the door. ‘Holiday!’ I agreed, and then she walked through the doors, smiling. No tears, no rancour, just the care-free steps of someone suffused with the joys of a permanent vacation. With apologies to the estate of George Bernard Shaw, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

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