The holiday - 2.5 days in JB - taken from my standard paper and pencil journal - Part One.

The room is enormous. Really it is. The length of it could accommodate 4 king size beds and that's not including the bathroom. There are 2 king size beds here and I'm lying on one of them, which I will share with my daughter later on. Ex is lying on the second bed, which he will share with our son. He has brought us here on a 3D2N family holiday. We left early this morning, at around 8.30, with his mum in tow. She came with us to do her visa for India so that meant instead of perusing bookstores for some holiday reading, we filled out forms for her at the India visa office. Not that I minded terribly. She's getting on now and although fiercely independent, it's good we can help her in some ways.

There were a few miscommunications between ex and his mum and I know I'm taking note of them because I always want to prove to myself that it's not just me he has a problem with. He thought she wanted to stay with us at the golf resort, she never said she wanted to. Just as well, because there is no sofa for ex to sleep on, as he'd planned to do. In fact, although the room is huge and looks out onto a lovely view of the golf course through a floor to ceiling wall of glass, it's lacking in the furniture department. This is a room for two men and their golf clubs. That's it. There is only two of anything - cups, towels, coffee packets, mugs - and anything extra comes at a cost. It's a good thing I packed extra mugs, coffee and food.

We dropped his mum off at her friends place and 'lo and behold, I actually navigated us there from the old map we had. It's the first time, and I'm not joking, that I've been successfully able to navigate from a map in this damned country. I even knew which direction we were coming from (I often lose my bearings) and where we were headed. YES! However, my feelings of joy were soon brought back down to earth when we arrived at the condo and I found that the special walnut cake ex had bought for this family was squashed because someone had placed the vomit kit (towels and plastic bags) on top of it. Ex wasn't impressed and assumed it was my fault (because everything is) and shook his head, smiled condescendingly, rolled his eyes and quietly thought to himself "you can't do anything right without my help"!

I let it go. I had to, as I have to every time. We went from there to the golf resort and again ex got the chance to do his little "what would you do without me" routine after I'd missed seeing the ten foot high sign that said "AUSTIN HILLS GOLF RESORT".

So we arrived and went out exploring after the kids had a bath and I'd showered. I love the hotel showers here and the kids always opt for a bath as the first thing to do on a holiday because our shower at home is pissy and we've never had a bath tub. We stopped for dinner at a restaurant of my choice and the food was fabulous - chicken chop (breadcrumbed chicken) with a variety of sauces served with rice, a tofu dish and some pork. Delish and cheap. Good choice Mummy.

I tried very hard during the holiday to be happy and light, aware of my surroundings, not clumsy and at the same time, take care of the kids. This only makes me look like a stressed out dill, I'm sure. I let a lot of the little things go - the eye rolling, the t-t-tsks, and the "oh-well" half smile that just tells me that he can't expect anything more than that from me, can he?

The thing is, it's not like he's any 'better' - who cuts their cake with a coffee stirrer (albeit a longish plastic spoon thingy, which had a sharpish horizontal edge) when there's a perfectly good pen knife around (albeit in the car glove box and I'd have to get it) When I offered the pen knife he looked at me like I'd offered him a chainsaw. I mean, there was literally nothing else to use, not even a spoon - pen knife or coffee stirrer - and he chooses the stirrer which eventually breaks and I secretly use the pen knife to cut the remaining cake, so we don't have to talk about it again. He had his cake and he ate it (too) without so much as a "hey, how did this cake get cut so nicely..."

It's strange the things we focus on - these are small things in the big picture but they are the things he focusses on too - these types of things are what annoys him. The way I handle the kids at lunch, not packing cutlery and (a big obvious one I admit) not dressing the kids warmly enough for shopping (it gets damn cold in there sometimes, especially for my skinny little son).

My daughter is starting to pick up on the things he thinks about me too and she's dead on. At dinner that day, the 'dress warmly' thingy came up and ex looked at me and was thinking "why can't you think of that?" and daughter spotted it, saying to her father "you were thinking that why can't mummy thin...." and she stopped, realising that she'd probably overstepped a boundary. Ex pushed her to finish the sentence and she wouldn't so I stepped in and told him that she knew what he was thinking. I tried to make light of it because I didn't want her to be embarrassed but she was right! He's so obvious.

That night, ex and son slept early while my daughter and I stayed up and played a board game. I didn't sleep well that night because ex's snoring, which I'm no longer used to, kept me awake. Daughter was up early the next morning and we went for a walk along the road by ourselves. It's funny but as time has gone on, I feel less and less safe here. Or more accurately, more conscious of my aloneness. I don't like it and it restricts what I can do. I need to be aware and watchful, but I know it's the same in every country. The world's not as safe as it used to be.

During the day, we swam, went shopping, out for lunch and planned to see a movie at night, sans ex. He was going to catch up with his friends and I decided not to say anything because I'm a coward and didn't want to spoil the holiday for the kids. So as I headed for the car that night ready to take the kids to the movies...