Traveling with kids? You’re not alone
If you’ve traveled with young kids, you know the look.
It’s a mixture of contempt and sorrow, loathing and dread. It registers on the faces of your fellow passengers, diners, people standing in line to rent a car/check into a hotel/ buy sunscreen/ secure a pool towel.
The moment they see you, it registers.
They need this vacation. They need to escape their email/rekindle their marriage/reclaim their time, and you’ve had the temerity to bring small, unpredictable humans into the mix. Their peace will be disrupted. Their flight will be cacophonous. Their mellow will be harshed. And it’s all your fault.
Sometimes the look turns into words — harsh, judgmental words. Words that convey disappointment, really, in your failure to plan better plane distractions or pack better snacks or birth a quieter type of baby or stay home.
The looks and the words wound you, in all likelihood. You internalize them and revisit them, over and over, wondering what you could have — should have, let’s be honest — done differently to avoid being such a colossal, epic vacation-ruiner for the nice people around you.
You Google “plane activities toddler” when you get back home, once your wounds have healed enough for you to once again consider traveling outside a four-block radius of your home. You vow to be a better member of society.
Or maybe you do none
of those things. Maybe you are a healthy, reasonable grown-up, secure in the knowledge that you are doing the very best you can with the circumstances in front of you and sometimes babies cry and sometimes toddlers melt down and sometimes tiny ears won’t pop and, honestly, you’re in public. Who expects public to be peaceful? Is public an antiquities museum? Did you miss a memo?
When my kids were little, I was not the healthy, reasonable jet-setting
grown-up. I was a bundle of nerves and insecurities and exhaustion and guilt and regret and also pretty sure we’d all return home with pinkeye and rotavirus.
My kids are 12 and 16 now and, honestly, the parts of our vacations that bring me the most joy are not the breathtaking views or spectacular sunsets or poolside mai tais. (Although I love all of those.) They’re the utter lack of tears. Mine or theirs.
We just returned from a spring break trip to Puerto
Rico. I was up early most mornings to sneak in a run before the real heat kicked in, and always there were a few lonesome, exhausted parents wandering the lobby, trying heroically to soothe a time-zoned-challenged baby — in all likelihood so the other parent and/or sibling(s) could continue to sleep.
I wanted to hug them, but that would have been weird. I settled for smiling at them, hoping it conveyed some kind of allyship.
It’s tempting to secondguess
every one of your parenting decisions, and there’s always a chorus of critics and naysayers to feed your endless doubts. This is especially true when you travel with young kids. We should have driven. We should have flown. We should have gone to Disney. We should have waited a year. We should have brought goody bags (or was it free drink coupons?) for our fellow passengers like that woman on “Good Morning America” (or was it Facebook?). We should have stayed home.
I’m not here to tell you what you should or shouldn’t have done. How could I possibly know? But I am here to tell you that I see you and I appreciate you and I want to give you a hug. Or help you find the goggles. Or hold the baby while you cut the toddler’s crusts off. Or buy you a drink. And probably someone else around you does too.
You’re not as alone as you feel.
Whatever you’re doing on your trip — trying to nudge your kids out of their comfort zone or show them a new source of joy and wonder or remind yourself what makes you feel alive or visit relatives you hardly see — you deserve that every bit as much as the guy in 27B deserves to escape his email.
You did not surrender your right to joy or wonder or aliveness when you signed on to raise our future generations. You don’t owe anyone a goody bag or a drink coupon.
And if, on the other hand, you are a person who is not traveling with young kids but simply sharing space with a person who is traveling with young kids, I nudge you toward kindness. You were also a baby once. And a toddler. You also benefit from a world in which children’s joy and wonder and brains and imagination are fed. Your patience is so much more appropriate than your disdain.
Parenting can be so, so lonely. And lovely, of course. But also lonely. Kindness really does go a long way.