I hear the news on the radio these days with a curious urgency. This is partly because I seldom find time for much else; other than the odd ten minutes browsing online in the evenings, I have not read a newspaper since the day before my babies were born. But if this urgency were only due to scarcity, it would not explain my intense reaction to certain news items. 

Though I have always listened to the news with interest and emotion, now whenever I hear of conflict, natural disaster, human suffering, I am overwhelmed with an empathy for the people involved like never before. And as I listen to the reporter’s words, it is a vision of a specific group of people that floods my mind and then wrenches at my guts – pregnant women, mothers and their young children. I can see women grasping their babies to their chests, reaching children into trucks, fearfully pouring dirty water, and thinking hopelessly ‘what will become of my child?’.

This may well sound sentimental to more measured types, and I know that I cannot speak for other people with or without children of their own, but I believe there is something of a kern of universal motherhood at work in me. The Berlin artist, Kaethe Kollwitz, famous for her sculpture of a grieving mother with her dead soldier son lying across her knee which now stands on the grave of the unknown soldier in Berlin, also made her living with artwork for mother and child health campaign posters. These posters show simple charcoal drawings of skinny children gathering around waiting to be fed, or of mothers, children on their hips, reaching out for bread. Her immense sculpture and the more modest drawings convey the same message of the absolute innocence of children, the hope and expectation that their lives deserve, and of a desperate parental empathetic love. It is as if she is the mother in each of her works, who cannot bear the slightest suffering for her children.

So as I sit having breakfast with my babies each morning, listening to the reports from Libya as I spoon creamy porridge into their birdlike mouths cheeping and gurgling at me for more, I am filled with overwhelming hope for their futures and a terrible sadness for mothers having their children into more troubling times.

“Will holidays ever be relaxing again?”, I thought, mildly perturbed, as I pulled our pram backwards the first morning of our holiday. The pram wheels dragged on the rough gravel of the neighbouring roads, equatorial wind and sun scorching my face, sleeping babies protected. The caravan of luggage we packed, our strenuous five hour flight and the war wounds we bore from wrestling the pram onto the roof rack of the hire car would suggest not, or at least not for the next few years. But then, even the older children scampering around the place we were staying did not appear to allowing their parents the peaceful bliss of intermittent book reading and snoozing in the sun. Oh dear.

A day or so later, and significantly more settled in – I knew now at least a good route with tarmac roads for our morning walk – we sat in a restaurant, both babies perched in high chairs, happily nibbling bits of fish from our plates. They were being much admired, I must self-flatteringly admit, by all the old ladies on the terrace and very sweetly entertained by the cheerful waiters. As the crystal blue waves lapped just below, I wondered if I had been somewhat hasty in my assumption. This was starting to feel like a holiday to me.

Of course, this easy contented time was to last for all of half an hour. No baby likes being in a high chair for that long, and ours soon wanted to be bouncing on our knees. But half and hour is half an hour and certainly long enough to eat one’s lunch. And, though we were to have many such moments as time went on, the truth about holidays and babies is that babies don’t have them. They carry on doing exactly what they need to do wherever they are – sun, sea and sand regardless. There were bound to be nappies to change, food to prepare, and broken nights. Being on holiday for us really only meant for us that we did not quite have the same resources as we have at home to meet our babies requirements. But I complain too much.

On the same trip I found myself sitting beside a young woman in a cafe. Her brow was furrowed as she alternated scrubbing suncream into her arms, staring into her novel and knocking back an early afternoon glass of wine. We fell into conversation. She, too, was a holidaymaker, with only a long weekend to enjoy what the holiday had to offer. Tuesday would see her return to London and a long day in the office. As I watched her trying furiously hard to relax in these four days allotted to same said relaxation, I began to understand what our holidays were to be for the time being.

We are no longer in the position to suspend our real lives for a few days and do nothing but lounge – children, well little babies, are not to be shelved like a job. Our pleasure and relaxation is to be gleaned in a different way, perhaps slower and more subtle, than that of holidays before children. It is in walking up the road and seeing the sea below, however early in the morning it may be. It is in washing up outside in the warm evening air, rather than in our centrally-heated flat. It is in knowing that we can travel for five hours on a plane and the babies will sleep at least for some of the flight, when we thought they might scream throughout. It is in feeding babies little titbits of fresh fish from our plates, whilst waiters charm them with cheeky pinches on their chubby cheeks. And I even managed to read my novel – for a few minutes – but I probably would have managed those few minutes at home too.