School Ski Trip: When saying no feels like failure | Saffron & Cyrus

I was flicking through a glossy lifestyle magazine, the kind where winter involves cosy chalets, perfect snow and hot chocolate delivered before you even realise you’re cold. It made me think of sledging as a child and curling up in front of the fire, and I lingered over the mountains with that familiar little ache for slow, indulgent winter mornings.

Then the school ski trip letter arrived.

The letters went out and the WhatsApp group lit up. Suddenly everyone was asking whether their child had been selected. I read the messages with a lump in my throat while quietly calculating how many tins of beans we’d need to live on to make it happen.

My mind pinged between Cyrus with his friends in a snow-dusted chalet and the rather less picturesque reality of December bills. The truth was simple: the price of the trip was roughly what we’d spend on a family summer holiday.

We said no.

We said it politely and firmly, but I was left with that sinking parental feeling that this wasn’t just a financial decision. Somewhere in my head, it had already become a significant childhood event that Cyrus would remember forever and possibly recount to somebody in 20 years’ time.

He shrugged, or at least appeared to. In all fairness, he really wasn’t as devastated as I had decided he must be. But part of me still wondered whether he was quietly storing the disappointment away somewhere, alongside all the other tiny disappointments and delights that eventually become our memories of childhood.

That was probably why the decision bothered me so much. My own parents couldn’t afford to send me on my state-school ski trip either.

I can still remember the disappointment. It sits somewhere in the archive of my teenage years alongside the bad fringe and that PE gym skirt and shorts. Shudder.

I don’t remember blaming my parents. I knew why I couldn’t go. But somewhere between then and becoming a mother myself, I seem to have made a quiet promise that Cyrus would have more.

I wonder how much of parenting is an attempt to go back and correct our own childhood through our children. If we missed something, they won’t. If something hurt us, we’ll protect them from it. If our parents couldn’t afford something, we’ll find a way.

Except parenthood doesn’t work like that. Neither, inconveniently, do household finances.

Being an older parent doesn’t mean a money tree magically appears because you’ve reached an age when everybody assumes you must have life sorted. We still have bills, priorities and limits, and we still have to choose.

Sometimes we have to say no.

The problem is that parenting decisions don’t feel particularly private anymore. There is always a WhatsApp group, an Instagram post, a photograph or a conversation at the school gate showing us what somebody else has said yes to.

None of those parents is necessarily judging us. We can do a perfectly good job of judging ourselves.

A decision that makes complete sense when you’re looking at the family budget can feel very different when you’re imagining your child watching his friends leave without him. Suddenly, “we can’t justify spending that” starts translating itself in your head into “we aren’t giving him enough”.

Once I’d stopped mentally relocating us to a diet of baked beans, I tried to think about what we can give Cyrus rather than concentrating on the one thing we had decided not to.

We can give him time and attention, holidays where we’re together and the security of knowing we’re there. None of that makes a ski trip less exciting, and I’m not interested in pretending children should prefer a bedtime story to the Alps. Given the choice at ten, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have.

But childhood isn’t an inventory of expensive experiences either. One of the useful things about reaching midlife is becoming a little better at distinguishing between what looks valuable and what feels valuable. I’m not completely immune to the glossy version. I just understand the editing process rather better now.

I don’t think the answer is to pretend I don’t want the chalet.

I can still flick through those glossy pages and imagine crisp mountain air, hot drinks and snow outside the window. I can picture myself drinking vin chaud somewhere in the Alps while somebody else deals with the wet gloves.

Dreaming isn’t the problem. Nor is being able to afford those experiences a moral failing in the opposite direction. Every family has different circumstances and makes different choices.

My gran tried to drum living within your means into me. It isn’t particularly glamorous advice and would probably struggle to fill a lifestyle magazine spread, but she had a point. There is something worth modelling in knowing what you can afford, deciding what matters to your family and being able to say no when something doesn’t fit.

The harder part is saying no without turning it into a judgement on yourself.

We said no to the school ski trip and I still don’t particularly like that we had to. Cyrus may well be disappointed. I’m also not going to pretend that a family summer holiday is interchangeable with going skiing with his friends, because it isn’t.

But saying no to one expensive opportunity doesn’t mean we’ve failed to give him a good childhood.

I’ll probably keep flicking through those magazines. I’ll still look at the chalets and imagine the snow, the mountains and that conveniently delivered hot chocolate. Then I’ll close the magazine, make another coffee and get on with the considerably less photogenic business of family life.

There will be things we can give Cyrus and things we can’t. There will be yeses and there will be nos. My job isn’t to make sure he never experiences the disappointment I felt as a child.

I spent years thinking that giving my child “more” meant giving him more than I had.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.