We leave our child behind when we go on holiday – and that’s happiness!

‘Do you want kids?’ asked the acquaintance, I ran into a blue December morning.

He was cradling his six-week-old son and I was on my way to a scan to check that the breast cancer I’d had ten years ago, aged 31, hadn’t returned. “Probably,” I told him. ‘Do it. It’s the best ever, he said.

I decided, assuming my scan was clear, that I would talk to Mark, my boyfriend of a few years and now my husband, about trying for a baby. We met on a dating website after I saw a picture of a smiling blue-eyed man with an old-fashioned camera in his hands and thought: I want to be with him.

After almost 15 years of being single and having cancer and chemotherapy, I was rejoicing in our blossoming love affair – its evenings in London’s tapas and cocktail bars and weekends away.

Although I was 39 at the time, children were not at the forefront of my mind. I was hoping to get them at some point. However, Mark had spent his 30s suffering from an autoimmune condition. At 40, finally better, he wasn’t keen on spending his spare time looking after a small child.

He took some persuasion. And during the four plus years it took us to conceive, eventually via IVF, I carried both a deep longing for a child, alongside fear of how my life and relationship might be compressed. Most of my friends were already parents. Many had stopped going out with their partner; they couldn’t find childcare, were too cranky or too tired of each other. Some had broken up.

The first summer of our son Alexander’s life we ​​spent Saturday afternoons in Regent’s Park eating pizza on a blanket. Mark and I laughed as our beautiful baby scooped up handfuls of mozzarella. I loved our little family. But I missed our old life: Saturday afternoon sex, before a movie or dinner.

When Alexander was a few months old, we tried weekly date nights. But after a few attempts of sitting in a restaurant, yawning and fantasizing about sleep, we stopped.

Soon our relationship with one of the flatmates-

cum caregivers. Conversations were lively, short and logistical: ‘you forgot to buy milk’; ‘why do I have to clean up the toys?’

When Mark worked full time in the office, when I used the handful of hours I had off to work as a yoga teacher and writer, the tasks became more full.

My habit of tossing tops in the laundry basket with the sleeves inside out now infuriated Mark, who does the laundry. And him coming into our narrow kitchen to make breakfast just as I was in the middle of emptying the dishwasher infuriated me. Sex dropped from at least weekly to sporadic.

Then, when Alexander was two, I asked Mark if he wanted to go away for a weekend. First he suggested we take Alexander with us. “No,” I said. ‘I want to be with you.’

Our 48 hour stay in a log cabin with an open fire in a forest in Kent was filled with walks, fish and chips at Whitstable beach and afternoon sex followed by a nap. The next time I suggested we go off on our own for a whole week, Mark was thrilled. I suggested it when we were stuck in a hotel room in Puglia with Alexander, now three. He rolled his handful of toy trains across the floor. Turns out he didn’t like the beach, the pool, or the heat.

‘At least it’s cheaper than divorce,’ I half-joked as we calculated childcare costs. Neither of us have parents who can look after Alexander, but we are lucky to have a babysitter he loves.

On our trip, the following year, I spent the mornings by the sparkling blue Aegean, reading and swimming. Mark explored local towns with his beloved camera. When we met for lunch at the restaurant on the seafront, I was excited to see him. Most evenings we ate dinner on the hotel’s cozy terrace, filled with garlands of small lights, overlooking olive groves. When my husband spoke to our waiter, I saw him with fresh eyes.

Sometimes I missed Alexander. When we visited the ice cream parlor we’d taken him to the previous year, I longed for his ecstatic chocolate-smeared face. When I saw a woman cuddling her young daughter by the pool, I longed to hug him.

But later, when I saw the same kid throw his pasta across the table, I was grateful for my week’s respite.

Within minutes of arriving home, we were thrown back into the routine of life. But the memory of our time together reminded me that my husband is so much more than the man who dumps his empty Amazon boxes on the floor.

Being a parent can be one of the best things ever. But one of its downsides is the pressure it puts on a relationship. I don’t want mine, with the man it took me half a lifetime to find, to become unsustainable.

As long as it is financially viable, Mark and I have agreed to take a trip alone every year. Now I daydream about Slovenia in June; of lying alone together, in a bed in the Alps, surrounded by high peaks and a big sky, with time and space to remember who we are and why we fell in love.