I hated it. I painfully tried to think of something "interesting" to talk about - some adventure that would excite my 4-year-old peers and elevate me to some invisible pedestal of "coolness" whilst gaining respectful glances from the Mean-Girls whose Daddies took them skiing in Austria every year and whose Mummies looked liked poised painted dolls with vaccuous smiles and frivolous playground-career-laughter. Instead I would trace through the events of the usual weekend in the Wallace household that looked like this:
Breakfast was uneventful; Dad would usually spent most of the day in the veggie garden, Mom in the kitchen preparing lunch or the chops for the evening braai. Sometimes my sister and I would swim, if it was Summer (wasn't it always Summer in South Africa when I was 4?) and Jeannie (the eldest) would spend the day in her room moodily listening to Duran Duran or doing Aerobics to A-HA. I would play with my Barbies and maybe watch some TV. Dad might bath the dogs. The dogs would shake their wet fur on the furniture and run around in the sunshine to get dry. Mom and Dad would sleep. Every afternoon. They would retire after lunch for at least two hours (which felt like fifty years) while I sat awake, anxiously willing the time to hurry up so they would wake up again and the solemn quietness of our cavernous house would lift and at least there would be movement and energy again even if it was just to pour a glass of wine ("the boeing has gone over!") or to light the braai. We never actually went anywhere or so it seemed. We stayed home and lived a very protected-but-isolated existense. We didn't have family friends and our closest Aunt, Uncle and Cousins lived five hours drive away down the coast in Durban and we only saw them at Easter and Christmas anyway.
So when it came to Monday mornings at school I would dutifully draw a picture of "my weekend" and revert to my usual story: "we had a picnic in the mountains" much to the obvious disapproval of my teacher, Mrs Boyle. Don't ask me why but a picnic in the mountains became my staple fall-back story. I guess I liked the idea of a picnic because I always secretly wanted to eat sandwiches without crusts with strawberry jam and I liked the idea of going out for the day somewhere majestic and the mountains appealed to me because I knew my Dad liked mountain climbing in his youth. I don't remember the exact pictures I drew of my weekends but they lacked detail because obviously they were entirely imagined. Class-mates chatted away about Aunties and Uncles visiting, friends coming over, going to the zoo or the theatre or even Sunday School and occasionally there was the odd ballet class or Judo lesson thrown in for good measure. Did they make those stories up too? Did their existense also revolve around make-believe at home with hand-me-down Barbie dolls and parents who were quite content in their introversion? I will never know. These days as a thirty-something adult I love having quiet weekends but there is something inside me that always pushes to do something fun even if it means trawling around the shopping centre for a few hours or dragging my wonderfully patient and delightful husband out to a restaurant for dinner. It's odd how nowadays the statement "I have a quiet weekend planned" is greeted with a universal "oh how wonderful!" from colleagues...so it's acceptable and even admired in some way to have a sedentry two days off work in your thirties. Perhaps my parents were doing just that; recovering from the week and the stress of having three daughters in private education, all demanding in our own ways and wanting different things from life. Perhaps the lesson is this: afternoon naps are good. You don't always have to go somewhere to have fun. Rest and quiet time at home is good and family time, above all else, is precious even if there are no picnics or mountains.
