In our early twenties, whenever we traveled, my husband and I heard the same refrain: “Do it now, because when you have kids, your traveling days are over!” Externally, I smiled at these well-meaning strangers, but inside, a struggle was brewing. Was it really one or the other?
Five years after we got married and more than a decade after we met, we shrieked and cried and hugged as two pink lines appeared. I knew our lives were about to change forever, but, like most newly pregnant women experiencing every emotion at once, I had a laundry list of guaranteed ways this baby wouldn’t change me. Thinking of all the people who warned us that settling down would mean settling for a life without travel, I resolved then and there that we would be an exception.
My husband and I, both individually and together, have been shaped by travel. We managed four years of long-distance through college, taking trains and buses and ill-advised road trips between my school in New York and his in DC. On our first trip to France together, he took me to the phone booth in Nice where he used a calling card to ring my dorm phone every week during his semester abroad. We got engaged in Greece, we annually pooled our ten measly vacation days for whistle-stop adventures abroad, we skipped the traditional beach-lounging honeymoon in favor of a jam-packed tour of Italy and Egypt. Eventually, we crafted a six-month trip around the world before moving to France for a year. Once there, we schemed and dreamed up a new life together in London.
In Europe, travel became even easier. We were nearly drunk with the accessibility—booking last minute weekends to new cities, hopping around the continent with relative ease. We were ready for our family to grow, but we weren’t ready to sacrifice it all just because our new bundle of joy would surely switch focus.
But suddenly everything felt like the last hurrah, and as my bump grew, so did our mileage account. In my first trimester, we carried our tiny secret with us to Istanbul. In my second trimester, I rubbed my non-existent bump on the beaches of Southern Spain, and my husband felt his first kick on an anniversary trip to Tuscany. At 32 weeks, we took our final flight to Geneva and drove into the Alps to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends.
On nearly every flight, the baby kicked and bounced and made his or her presence known, reminding me that something was different, and everything was about to change.
When my fit-to-fly letter expired around 34 weeks, I experienced a mini moment of panic. Was that it? Were our traveling days over? My husband reminded me that in March, when our baby would be just shy of two months, he had a conference in Cannes. I couldn’t imagine staying home alone with this tiny stranger, so we decided that the south of France was surely the best intro to travel anyone could have. We booked the tickets, and I promptly forgot about any of it.
We hunkered down for the next three months—staying still for the first time in a long time. Nesting mania replaced any stir craziness I might have experienced, and, six days before my due date, on a cold night in January, my water broke. Sixteen hours later, when the doctor gleefully announced, “IT’S A GIRL!” after my final push, everything fell instantly into place. She was here, she was perfect, and she explained months of heartburn with a full head of red hair. We had a daughter, and she was the best distraction from our itchy feet.
We bonded quickly and fiercely, but a little postpartum anxiety and a lot of sleep deprivation had me in a haze. I spent the first month in survival mode. I was on autopilot, focusing on random benchmarks: just make it to her first midwife appointment, our first pregnancy class reunion, our first overseas visitor. My husband was next to me, reminding me to eat and shower and go for a daily walk, but I was unrecognizable to myself. When he went back to work after the first week, my daughter and I just stared at each other. I slept when she slept, I cried when she cried, and I could not imagine how life would ever go back to anything resembling normalcy.
At six weeks, I felt a bit of the relief that everyone had promised. We had a routine, breastfeeding wasn’t taking up the majority of my day, and we were sleeping in 3-4 hour increments. I let myself enjoy a glass of wine, I put on red lipstick. I was waking back up, just a little.
And then, we had to pack for our very first trip as a family of three.
Motherhood handed me another list of ways I had changed. I could no longer travel with just a carry-on, and even the language was foreign. We couldn’t forget the travel cot and buggy and nappies and dummies. I calmly told myself that it would be worth it. We’d get our first trip under our belt, and a few more pieces of our old life would become tangible and real again.
I thought about our honeymoon as I piled muslins into a packing cube. It was a trip where nearly everything went wrong. My husband got major food poisoning in Egypt that lasted through the first half of our time in Italy, and when he fully recouped, I came down with a horrific sinus infection. It was the least romantic honeymoon in the history of honeymoons, but we were blissfully happy newlyweds who couldn’t stop laughing. We came home glowing. Together, we could wonder at the world’s beauty, even among the seriously gross moments.
On our first night in Cannes, our daughter screamed so loudly during our clumsy attempt at a bath in the hotel room’s enormous tub that the front desk called to ask if everything was ok. On the third night, my husband was suddenly so sick he could barely leave the room. By the fourth night, I had picked up his bug and couldn’t keep anything down. The only one who stayed healthy and happy and beaming was our newborn. Our perfect traveler, our little light who was letting us know that this was it. She was officially game for anything. This time, we wondered at her beauty among some seriously gross moments.
This past January, my daughter turned three. She’s now the proud big sister to a bald, bouncing, busy baby brother. She’s been to over a dozen countries, and loves counting sleeps until her next plane ride. Her little brother isn’t too far behind in his country count, and he beat her first milestone by about two weeks, conquering an international flight to the States at six weeks old. That should be enough to tell you: we haven’t been at all scared off from travel.
Everything in our little world has changed. When I held my daughter on her first night earthside, I was positive that every single planet must have realigned to make room for her in the universe. It happened again 27 months later, as my son screamed so loudly that I had to ask a midwife to leave the room when she implied he might not be enjoying his new surroundings.
But even though everything is different, travel is our anchor. When I’m overwhelmed with the day-to-day, when I wonder how we’re doing this with no immediate family on call in a place that I feel so lucky to live, traveling together brings me back. It’s exhausting. Vacation probably won’t be vacation again for 18 more years, at minimum. But it also reminds me that the real world is still out there, there are things much bigger than us, the old me is in here somewhere.
At three and almost one, our kids may not remember every (or any!) trip we’ve taken yet, but it’s worth it. Through travel, I get to keep a huge part of myself tied and taped and glued together. They get to see their mom and dad in their element, enjoying the thing they once loved most in the world – before they came along, and parenting bumped traveling to a very close second place.
