Nursing my daughter in the back seat of the Honda as we left town for the weekend — me kneeling over her with a hand braced against the window as if to wave (or perhaps hold out a big STOP!) at passersby — probably should have been a good clue that I would be facing some unique challenges on our travels.
You’d think I would have chosen this moment to consider the other adjustments my children would demand of me while we visited my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia. You’d think I would have pondered how a seven-month-old might respond to a new setting, new faces, and the absence of the hound dogs with whom she is so fascinated. (No worries on the last front, as Pete and George made their houndness roundly accessible to her.)
I am sorry to report, however, that the only thought running through my mind as I leaned over Lily’s car seat while we idled at a traffic light was how glad I was that no one was waiting at the bus shelter at which my position required me to stare as if looking forward to a chat with whoever was sitting there ogling me.
Travel Babies (the adult kind)
The circumstances surely warranted such extreme and no doubt illegal measures.
Our prompt 4 p.m. departure had slipped into a sloppy-but-we-have-kids-after-all 5:20 start time. Not because I hadn’t mostly packed for myself, a toddler, and an infant — multiple changes of clothes, winter coats pulled out of closets in anticipation of freezing cold temperatures, diapers and the co-sleeper and books and DVD’s for the car and bottles and just-in-case packets of instant mac and cheese.
I was actually astoundingly close to being ready when Mike called to tell me he was heading out of work. I just hadn’t installed Lily’s new car seat.
It was not, to be perfectly accurate, Lily’s “new” car seat. New to her, yes. But much used by Jake during his less and less frequent trips in an eleven-year-old two-door Benz with iffy climate control that we all now unironically refer to as the race car. We had failed to take advantage of one of the many sales Amazon.com had offered on the car seat since Lily was born, figuring that it would be some time before she would outgrow her infant seat and, hey, in a pinch, she could use Jake’s extra one.
Well, babies have a way of suddenly becoming about twice as big as you remembered them being yesterday, and questionable attempts at frugality have a way of putting you out a lot more frustration than you would have been out cash had you just taken advantage of that sale when it popped up in the first place. Here we were without a sale in sight and I had decided that Lily was entitled to a new, big, convertible car seat for the four-and-a-half-hour ride to Lewisburg, West Virginia.
So, in the morning, I conscientiously reminded Mike to take the car seat out of his car. He did. It sat on the porch while I did the aforementioned packing, took my mother-in-law to lunch, and made oatmeal raisin cookies that my mother-in-law tied up in plastic bags with big blue bows to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday. I did not install the car seat.
Instead, I threw myself into the task as Mike carefully packed the hatch. With a feeling of great freedom, I took the infant seat and its 500-pound base out and carried them into the house. It was as if the Honda let out a sigh of relief muffled only slightly by the crumbs of Jake’s snacks nestled into the indentations left in the gray leather seats.
The Honda may have moaned slightly as I returned with the larger, more unwieldy convertible seat, but I didn’t hear it. I was too busy celebrating yet another milestone in my small daughter’s life. The Barcalounger of car seats, the moment when she would rest in cushioned comfort in the car instead of being smushed into a cocoon of crash-resistant materials.
Expertly, I positioned the car seat on the car seat and reached for the belts to click onto the LATCH system.
I came up empty-handed.
Puzzled, I looked at Jake’s seat. Belts attached to metal tubes along both sides of the seat were buckled securely to the car. But there were no belts attached to the identical metal tubes on the identical car seat in my hands. Nor anywhere else my search took me.
“I’m confused,” I said as Mike dragged yet another suitcase out to the car. “Where are the belts?”
Mike took a quick look at the car seat and a somewhat longer look at the clock on his cell phone. Then he shrugged.
“But,” I protested. “Lily can’t ride all the way to West Virginia in the infant seat.”
Obligingly, Mike dropped what he was doing and searched his car thoroughly. About all this did was confirm what we already knew — that his car pre-dates the LATCH system and he therefore did not have a reason to use the missing belts and therefore could not say for certain whether they had always been missing, had been thrown away with the original packaging, or were sitting in some clever cubbyhole behind the shoe rack in his bedroom closet.
Without a word, he disappeared into the house and returned with the just-now-banished infant seat.
“NOOOO!” I screamed, or maybe something less likely to make him explode in a justified fury of finding ourselves still parked in front of the house as the sun dipped lower and lower toward the horizon.
“I can figure it out,” I said with a smidgen of real confidence. I have, after all, on more than one occasion singlehandedly set up the television-TiVo receiver-DVD player-VCR player-system receiver-speaker system sitting outdated and clunky in a corner of our living room. I have constructed more pieces of Ikea furniture than I could count. I alone — and not my two male roommates in my post-college Boston apartment — knew how to set the VCR to record Guiding Light.
In fact, I enjoy working my way through instructions, be they non-literal English translations, overly solicitous collections of letters and numbers, or deceptively simple illustrations with meaningless arrows pointing to a plane of existence that does not exist in my world. Surely I could decipher the set of pictures squeezed into a panel on the side of the car seat.
Quickly, I ascertained which two applied to the task at hand — a rear-facing installation done with seat belts instead of the LATCH system. And, carefully, I began stringing the seat belt through clips and over metal things in a way that I thought resembled the increasingly inadequate picture at hand.
Okay, so it didn’t work the first time. And by the third time the seat belt seized up on me, deigning to retract but not to expand, I was cursing more than a little bit and not very quietly. The kids, after all, were safely half a mile out of hearing range at school. Waiting for us to pick them up. And, Mike informed me in the midst of my cursing, wishing, in Lily’s case, to take the nap the caregivers were denying her in the hopes that it would make our car trip easier, with her sleeping during it and all.
This last piece of information did not imbue me with calm. Instead, I pinned my increasingly frazzled hopes on the neighbor I spotted walking her dog down the block. Maybe, I hoped, just maybe, she would have an extra, outgrown car seat just, you know, hanging out in the front hallway.
By the time I flagged her down — no doubt a frightening sight with my eyes wild and my hands shaking and my chest showing the effects of neglecting to factor time to pump into my afternoon — Mike had grimly retreated to the living room, where he read the newspaper and his mother snoozed on the couch, both waiting out the fury of my refusal to let my daughter ride in that infant seat just one more time, even if it meant we would never make it to Lewisburg.
“Oh, I know how to do that,” my neighbor assured me, clambering gamely into my car as my heart fluttered with a faint hope.
She pulled at the seat belt. It seized up on her as it had on me. She tried again, straining and pulling and, in the end, agreeing with me that something was not quite right with the set up.
Even when I am truly good and crazy, I am not crazy enough to risk my baby’s safety for the sake of a comfortable ride. Which is why, as we finally left town at 5:30 with the last of the rush hour traffic, it was the cramped infant seat over which I crouched, my breast offered in one hand to Lily’s satisfied lips.
And I Thought the Actual Travel Was the Hard Part of Traveling with Kids
We arrived at 10:30 p.m. after a relatively uneventful trip of me handing out cheese crackers and bottles while sandwiched between the two car seats. Jake watched an unbroken string of DVD’s, the last few through sleepily drooping eyelids. Lily slept a grand total of two hours before awakening and asking me to please entertain her. And I gobbled grocery store sushi on I-26 just over the Tennessee border, shared an apple with both my kids, and then wished for junk food through the entire stretch of Virginia.
But we arrived in one piece to a weekend with all the highlights that make traveling with small children, on balance, well worth it: Jake’s joy at the train set his cousin last played with a decade ago — now at our house on loan until Aunt Maureen has grandchildren — and his particular love of “Thomas and his best friends,” two nameless trains that may or may not be part of the same set. Lily’s line on the wall marking the cousins’ growth, drawn while I clutched her arms and she straightened her legs and “stood” with her back pressed against the wall. A bundled walk between rows of apple trees, curtailed by a gust of wind that brought Jake’s familiar howl of, “I don’t like the wind!” drifting my way. Beautiful dinners and reading books with Grandma and Jake playing guitar with his cousin’s fifteen-year-old friends and Lily drifting toward sleep wrapped in a blanket in her uncle’s lap.
In short, we will be returning.
Even though.
Even though right before dinner every night Jake turned to me with big blue eyes and said, “Can we go home now?” and when I told him we couldn’t said, politely, “Please can we go home now?” Even though it takes more than mere coordination to land a tiny spoon of baby food in your baby’s mouth when she is sitting on your lap looking everywhere but at you. Even though schedules were off and crying fits ensued and Lily and I had only a short bit of time alone to sneak in some TiVo. (The rest of the family was at the Appleby’s pancake fundraiser her cousin Etta was working; Lily’s naptime and my non-pancake-eating allowed us to bow out gracefully.)
And even though Lily woke up, quite literally, at least every hour and half all night. All three nights we were there.
Since Mike and Jake were also in the room with us, this meant they woke up as frequently as I did. Sometimes to my voice hissing, “I don’t know what you WANT!!!”
And, sadly, I didn’t. Until our last night there, at about 4 a.m. When it occurred to me that maybe I’d get some sleep if I put Lily in bed next to me — in the spot vacated by Jake, who had moved to the twin mattress on the floor with his father, perhaps to get further away from Lily’s yells. Maybe, just maybe, I admitted through a haze of exhaustion, Lily is unhappy being awakening in a strange place in a strange crib with a strange being who sounds like her mother shushing her unkindly.
Of course, that’s all it took for Lily — and the rest of us — to get a good four-hour block of sleep. For her mother’s slow moving brain to figure out that — surprise! — babies feel a bit off when they’re in a strange place, no matter how warm and loving and downright comfortable their parents might find it.
So, yes, I have forgiven myself for my unforgivable behavior toward my daughter. Mainly because, to be honest, at this point in my parenting life I’ve figured out that it’s completely forgivable to hiss a little bit in the middle of the night, especially when you do offer food and comfort as they are needed.
But also, no doubt, because since being home Lily has slept like something approaching a champ. A reminder that one of the nicest things about traveling is coming home again.
Yoga to Smooth Out the Rough Edges (Ardha Baddha Padmottanasana)
So, um, where’s the yoga?
It hit me as I finished my narrative, that there wasn’t any one big moment of I can’t take it anymore-ness to write about. No anxiety-laden reflections on how to get through the tough bits of parenting. No one lesson to be culled from one parenting event.
Instead, the weekend was a reminder of much of life — with or without kids. Things shift around us, we lose our rhythm, the ability to satisfy our habits, the structure that holds us together.
As adults, we aren’t much attuned to the changes, or at least willing to admit that they affect us. Sure, we talk about jet lag or how hard it is to sleep on an unfamiliar pillow, but we tend to gloss over how deeply the little changes affect us. We’re geared to believe we can keep on running in exactly the same mode even if things feel different.
One thing’s for sure, we don’t wake up with a yell every hour all night. Because, even at our most insomniac, we adults know we’re not supposed to express our frustration with a good, loud cry.
All Lily was doing, then, was expressing what we were all feeling. She had plenty of happy moments where she crinkled her nose and laughed and thought her aunt’s house was a pretty great place to be. But, unlike her father and me, she couldn’t carry those moments over to the minor disruptions of travel, the things that make being home again feel so good.
What I think I’m trying to say is that we all practice yoga all the time when we adjust to changes without really trying. When we acknowledge a bit of discomfort and then move on. Maybe it’s easier to do when we’re traveling because we pretty much expect to have things shift.
The trick, of course, is learning to adjust when we’re not expecting the shifts. To be okay with the discomfort when it arises unexpectedly. To sleep on a strange pillow even in our own beds at night.
And this is where I offer ardha baddha padmottanasana (half bound lotus standing forward fold) as a way to manifest this lesson in an asana.
I chose this pose for several pertinent (I think) reasons. First, it’s a balance pose, and much of what I’m writing about here is trying to find your balance when things around you are not. Second, it’s also a challenging stretch — a way of opening to possibility if you are willing to transcend discomfort. And, finally, it is very, very challenging, with several lovely stopping places along the way to the full pose.
Which means that you can practice an ardha baddha padmottanasana that is all your own, no matter what shifts are happening in your life right now.