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All parents know that occasional one-on-one time with kids is a good thing.
But when you're a single parent, the parent-and-child vacation is a compulsory affair, and not always desirable. You alone must make all the plans and take care of every detail on the road, and you can't even hit the bar to unwind at the end of the day. (Tip: The savvy single parent will budget for heavy mini-bar use.)
Without proper planning, the exercise can be a disaster. Separated, with one daughter, I've made every single-mom-vacation mistake possible, feeling like the world's biggest loser at nuclear-family-infested beaches and ski resorts and feeling ridiculous alongside my daughter on toddler rides at foreign amusement parks.
Then, when I finally did figure things out, the rules changed. Suddenly, my pliable child - once content with the penguins in Central Park, a ride on the Eye in London, or watching Wedding Crashers in Paris with a French audience who laughed at all the wrong parts - had become a world-weary teen with a year of art school under her belt. At 15, Eliza is actually a complex and surprisingly reasonable person, but let's face it -- Facebook held much more appeal for her than spending endless hours of enforced quality time with her mother.
It was time to consult the experts.
A quick search showed the single-parent family vacation is now a firmly entrenched trend, with resorts waiving singles supplements (though usually in the off season), and major outfits like Beaches offering single-parent packages. Websites such as singleparenttravel.net (founded by Brenda Elwell, author of the Single Parent Travel Handbook) offer advice that ranges from insultingly useless ("Make a packing list") to a helpful stating of the obvious ("Have kids memorize the name of the hotel").
But virtually all the information was for people with kids, not for people with post-kid, pre-adult aliens. So I turned to a specialist: clinical psychologist Anthony E. Wolf, this newspaper's columnist on parenting teenagers. His first piece of advice made sense: "Have stuff planned out, have a structure you can play off, but be flexible."
The second was unexpected: "During the entire time of the vacation, you are not allowed to change noticeable character flaws. For example, if the child walks too fast, or too slow, or uses a crabby bratty tone, don't pick up on it."
My second expert was Diane Moody, a family and child therapist in Toronto, whose advice also touched on attitude: "Expect some very bad moments travelling with your children. I used to remind mine that travelling can be difficult and that we will have grumpy times as well as good times, as there is no such thing as a perfect vacation."
Fine. But the question of where to go remained, so I interpreted their advice as follows: 1) Pick a destination guaranteed to please at least one of us, i.e., me; 2) make sure it intersects somewhat with her interests (at least the legal, respectable ones); and 3) schedule events so as to avoid any pressure on her to engage in meaningful mother-daughter communication.
GLASGOW
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe fit the bill perfectly, with three days in Glasgow to start - mainly because of its famous native son, architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His world-renowned Glasgow School of Art was completed in 1809 and its main building is every bit as fairy-tale-ishly cute today.
We even went on a touristy tour, but this one was led by a charmingly quirky art student (a beautiful brunette in form-fitting woollens with little Nordic boots, like some kind of sexy hobbit librarian) and the building was not only filled with Mackintosh's trademark whimsical details and custom furniture but was also alive - a real, working art school, with exotically raffish students and a jumble of statues and paintings to navigate. Eliza started asking if they took foreign students and how soon she could apply. (She never bothers to mask her desire to leave home as soon as possible, but this time I took it as a victory.)
