Brianna Parkins: Ever the resourceful daughter, I drugged Mam with the dead dog’s Valium

I don’t know when holidays start now as an adult. Is it an airport pint? Is it landing and getting a blast of warm, foreign air to the face when you exit the automatic airport doors? As a child it was simple. It was my dad at 5am, shaking the shoulders of everyone in the house to wake us up with his gentle loving refrain of “if your arse isn’t in the car in 20 minutes we’re going without you”.

We obviously would not pull out of the driveway until three hours later, following Dad’s existential crisis over what could and could not fit in the boot. It was usually at this time that he would become a sudden devotee of minimalism. “Do you actually even need shoes? We’re going to the beach.”

I spent my childhood in the back of an un-airconditioned Honda as my parents dragged us up and down the east coast of Australia in 40-degree heat.

Stephen, my dad, will probably write a letter to the editor disputing this claim. When we were kids he used to say the small hatchback that contained two adults, two kids and an increasingly put-upon dog did in fact have air conditioning. “It’s a model 280”, he’d say smugly. “Two windows down going 80kms an hour.”

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My mam charts time by births and pregnancies. My dad measures time by what car he had at the time. We all go by what's important to us, I guess

I now know dads in fact draw their energy from laughing at their children’s non-life-threatening discomfort. You can witness this any time a male relative rips a fart and giggles as other members of the family in the vicinity gasp and cry out in horror at a smell so bad it could constitute a war crime.

The advent of electric windows, the kind the driver could put up and lock, was not a technological advance welcomed in our family. One of my dad’s mates was truly an innovator in this field. He would innocently ask the car, “Does anyone smell petrol?” causing the passengers to inhale panicked lungfuls of air. Air that was filled with the flatulence dropped strategically seconds before. We should have called child services looking back.

Australians are only allowed two holidays. Up the coast and down the coast. This meant 12 hours in a car with one radio that didn’t work in remote locations. This gave us plenty of time to listen to my parents argue about what year we got a new carport.

My mam charts time by births and pregnancies. “Now that was when Donna was pregnant with Kyle, Brianna had turned three a few months earlier.” My dad measures time by what car he had at the time. “Now that was after the Honda, but were we driving the Commodore? Yep it was 1994.” We all go by what’s important to us I guess.

The biggest trip we ever undertook was bringing my mam and her mam back to Ireland in 2016 when I competed in the Rose of Tralee. My mam is not the calmest flier at the best of times. You add on being responsible for transporting three ball gowns, two old-age pensioners and two gormless Australians (me, dad) across the world on two flights totalling 24 hours including a Dubai layover and the poor woman was, in medical terminology, “in a complete jock”.

Months earlier our beloved family dog had died, but before he did he had developed a lifelong habit of jumping out of open windows and through expensive flyscreens whenever he heard fireworks. The vet prescribed a sedative to give to him before New Year’s and Halloween. It turns out dog benzodiazepine is actually just human benzodiazepine with ‘Lucky the dog’ stuck on the label. So I asked if Mam would like a tablet I’d robbed from the dog’s cupboard.

Wearing a hand-me-down bikini top whose loose elastic was no match for a water slide

Yes, being the ever resourceful and thoughtful daughter I am, I did indeed drug my mother with the dead dog’s Valium. (I did check the expiry date and made sure she wasn’t on interacting medications or had certain conditions; I’m a terrible, terrible person but not a monster.) Recently I confessed to her what I did and she agreed that she did have a lovely flight and was in fact annoyed that I hadn’t given her one on the way home.

We always seem to remember family holidays the best. This is because they are always at least slightly traumatic and trauma sticks in the brain. I’m not alone. For every magic moment there’s the walking in on an elderly uncle with a lax attitude to shower locks and an unnerving dedication to manscaping.

A lot of family holiday misery is caused by parents “saving money”. Having to share a bed with your sister at the age of 16  or wearing a hand-me-down bikini top whose loose elastic was no match for a water slide. We should demand the money they saved be put into a therapy fund as compensation.

But now, as an adult who can go anywhere but back to my family, I would give anything to be sitting in the backseat of a baking car, caravan in tow, with my parents in the front arguing over whether the Fleetwood Mac or Glen Campbell tape would go in next. Except this time I’m smart enough to demand air conditioning and access to a window at all times.