Here’s the scene: I am sitting in an aisle seat, the usual lack of leg room a given. My 21-month-old son John is screaming at the top of his lungs because I won’t let him toddle past my legs into the aisle (the “fasten seatbelt” sign refuses to budge). Luckily, the middle seat is empty, which gives him about 5 square inches to squirm in, but the entertainment provided by the nice businessman in the window seat (tossing John’s plush duck up in the air and onto his head, very giggle-inducing) is starting to become repetitive. He wants out, to toddle up and down the aisles, poke people’s laptops, and steal their spectacles while they’re sleeping.
You’ve heard this before, yes? Of course, since you read my last essay about airlines torturing people who travel with children. The trip back from California wasn’t much better. Although it comprised two shorter flights rather than one six-hour one, they were also full of screaming and frustration that punctuated hours of hardcore full-on entertainment. By me, Mummy, Inc.
It would be so easy to dress my writing in a chirpy tone of voice and pretend that if you bring “some favorite toys!” “tasty snacks!” and “an upbeat attitude!” then traveling with your child will be a delight, a pleasant memory you’ll take with you until you become a senile addict of microwaved spinach soufflés.
When I write with exclamation points, I know I’m being false, like smiling for the camera when I’m pissed off. Here’s what I will remember up until the day I get dementia: holding John in my lap as he sorted piles of crackers on the tray table, piling them into a plastic cup, looking up at me, pleased, and dumping them back out again to start over (cracker pieces, crushed cracker, cracker crumbs everyfuckingwhere), all the while thinking, “Okay, he’s entertained, please let me not go insane for the next 15 minutes.” It’s a long way to spend 6 hours, counting out 15-minute increments of trying not to lose my mind. I was hoping he’d sleep for 2 hours, but only got 1. I spent a lot of time looking jealously at all the people engrossed in books.
This lack of patience, this failure of ability to be completely focused on my child’s every need, is not something I necessarily respect about myself, but at home I can deal with it. Maybe it’s because there’s more physical space, but in truth I think it’s because travel has always been my thing, an activity imbued with excitement, anticipation, challenge, and ritual. I’ve got my way of traveling, and it doesn’t include the needs of someone entirely dependent on me. In fact, my wanderlust preferably includes no people at all.
I would prefer not to travel with my son, at least until he’s, say, a precocious 15-year-old who’s read all the books I have and learned to say “please” in 10 languages. No matter how enriching it is for him, it’s not how I want to do it. When you travel with children, wherever you go becomes much more about keeping them occupied and fed and properly rested – within reasonable limits – than about the place itself, and the place is what matters to me.
This failure to adapt is, again, not something I respect about myself, and it’s not just because there are about a zillion people out there just waiting to pounce with “selfish! bad mommy!” accusations. It’s because I can be very critical of others’ inability to adapt while traveling. Jeffrey Taylor, an excellent and well-known travel writer, intelligent and widely published, has irritated me to no end in no less than three books. Why? Because in each one, at some point, he got annoyed at his guide for trying to change the schedule, or for disappearing; or refused to stay for the full length of a rare tribal festival because he had to meet a river on a certain date. I wanted to slap him upside the head: you’re a travel writer! Who cares if your schedule’s screwed up? This is about the place, the people, the experience, not about whether you’re going to meet the right boat on time.
And then I go off counting 15-minute intervals of not-quite-insanity rather than letting the experience envelop me and take me where it will.
On my way back to the Hudson Valley, I noticed something. While I was stressing about John’s crying, and his consistent diet of Late July organic saltines and random chocolate chip cookies, and his kicking of the seat in front of us, and stealing people’s water bottles, and punching laptop keys with lightning-quick fingers, … while I let these perfectly normal toddler activities wind me into twisted little knots, nobody else on the plane did. Most people looked wistfully at John, and told me about their own grandkids, their habits and antics. Most people smiled as he walked up and down the aisle, and up and down again, and again – many people craving the shining, no-holds-barred smile of my little social butterfly to be turned back to them as if he were a movie star. Most people didn’t hear his screams, or wanted to help distract him.
The stress of flying with a child came from me, not from John, and not from other people. Yet another lesson of parenting. It seems we learn the same one over and over, to embrace the chaos that comes into our lives with a brand-new growing, thriving human.
I regret my former traveling life. I crave the ability to spend three frozen hours walking around a Russian village in below-zero temperatures, probably not recommended with kids. I can’t get lost in where I am anymore because someone is depending on me to pay attention. This is all a new horizon for me, unexplored territory. And I refuse to give up thriving on travel just because it feels more difficult.
Just don’t expect the chirpy exclamation points.
Yeah, it’s like labor. No one wants to tell you how much it truly sucks. 🙂
Do not feel guilty for one moment that entertaining an itchy kid in a tube, for hours, does not seem to be “what you signed up for.” It is, only you didn’t really know it, and now you can’t break the contract.
For what it’s worth, my kids are now lovely travel companions (mostly – still too picky as eaters) but they are 9 and 16. Long-haul travel, the kind you and I like, was a majorly tough gig for awhile. The good news is, other than during Flying Torture, they’re usually pretty fun once you get to your destination, as long as you don’t overload them (you know, the way I always do!)
Thanks, Sheila 🙂 You’re my lifeline when it comes to thinking of wanderlust with the family! Seriously … I know I’m always going to overload my kid(s) with a passion for travel and curiosity about everything. My father always did, but now that I’m older I can at least have intelligent conversations with him about all sorts of things, so I’m hoping little John will someday get the same benefit!
But I’m tempted not to fly with him again until he’s old enough to be totally entranced by a 3-hour DVD 😉
I definitely sympathize (and have been in that same situation myself). I traveled for 13 months with my son when he was one and two.
I had three responses to your post though:
1. Although traveling with kids is totally different and much more about their needs, I’ve also found that I’ve done and seen things I might have missed had I been traveling solo. And that I really enjoy experiencing things through my children’s eyes. Watching my 3-year-old fall in love with the Eiffel Tower was just as magical as when I did the same thing twenty years ago. The travel experience isn’t *always* diminished -sometimes it’s just different.
2. It definitely gets easier as they get older. Mine are now 7 and 4 and because I’ve traveled with them since they were infants, they are completely unfazed by long car or airplane trips. And I own no portable DVD or video-game player.
Hang in there – I think if you don’t give up, you’ll ultimately find it to be worthwhile. (And of course it’s TOTALLY OK to take trips without your child too!)
And yes, I can’t do math – that was two responses, wasn’t it! 🙂
Nia, I think you pretty much summed up how my mother used to feel traveling with my brother and I way back when we were too young to understand the joys of travel.
By the way, I’m one of those who smile and think the kids still pretty cute as it tries to run up and down the aisles. Maybe it’s because once that was me.
Just hold onto the thought, as Sheila says, kids do evolve into great travel companions – eventually.
I loved your descriptions! I, too, get so tense when I board a plane with my kids, sensing the other passengers’ glares, all of us worrying that something will go very wrong. But it’s always turned out fine, and other passengers were helpful and kind, though I was always so exhausted from being the 4-hour flight entertainment to my kids when they were little, and responding to the constant “mommy?” “mommy?” “mommy?”
From the time they were 7 flying became easier: they LOVE to travel, keep themselves amused, are polite to other travelers, and though they are so excited to be going somewhere and thus talk non-stop, I actually get to read a bit!
Don’t tell me about it ! (have 3 kids)
Mara, adding is an overrated skill 😉 Thanks you so much for your thoughtful comments. It makes things easier, looking ahead and knowing it’ll turn out better in the end. I did have a lot of fun taking John to Rome & Vienna when he was about 8 months, so maybe there’s a window where it’s just really difficult. And, like you said, as with so many things in life, they help us look at the world through refreshed eyes.
Sandy, that’s encouraging! Your experience seems to reinforce the idea that a lot of the stress comes from our own worries and expectations, rather than what actually happens — although, as you say, the exhaustion that comes from keeping the little ones entertained is pretty comprehensive. Still, it amazes me that, actually, people on the plane are generally pretty nice and helpful.
Julie, I’m with you — or will be, some day. You have my sympathies!
Liz, thank you! My mother never took us flying (except in my grandfather’s little Cessna) until I was 14 and my sister 9. A Montana childhood was all about driving long distances, and I’m sure she went nuts sometimes, but we learned early on that we were expected to entertain ourselves. Guess that’s what I need to work on as John grows … and it *is* worth it, in the end.
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