When the Vacation Ends and You Still Have 2,500 Miles to Go. With Kids.

My approach to the end of a good vacation is to panic.

My stomach twists into a little cherry-stem bow at the very thought of resuming a regular life.  I see the piles of laundry arranged almost neatly in the suitcases as mountains of unsettled-ness to be scaled before I can breathe again.  I feel like a small child clinging to the idea of having no responsibilities, coddled, cared for, and carefree.  (Never mind that I seldom felt care- or responsibility-free in my actual childhood.)

If this is the way I feel after a merely mediocre time away — say that late fall weekend we spent in Hilton Head shuddering at the suburban-ness of it all, mourning the fact that we managed to book only two of our three days at the hotel with the good indoor pool, and reduced by unending rain to the playground at the outlet mall — imagine how sick I was to leave Los Angeles after days of 80-degree weather and the excitement of my sister’s wedding.

[A mea culpa here to all my LA friends who are just now discovering that I was in town and didn't bother to call them.  We were consumed by wedding, which merely intensified my fantasies about a three-week visit to Southern California where we can properly see everyone we love.  And then, I promise, I will call.]

Even if the only time I ever want to once again live in my old bedroom at my parents’ house is when I wake up in that bedroom the morning before getting on a plane home, the fact remains that I very much wanted to stay.  Did I mention it was eighty degrees during the wedding weekend?

My mother-in-law was visiting as well, making the full-time childcare that usually renders me twice as exhausted at the end of a vacation as I was at the start of it much more of a breeze.  “Do you mind if I leave her with you for a little while?” I would say, handing my fussy baby over to her grandmother’s eager hands as I rushed off to a yoga class.

And then there was the elevator drop of a let-down after the big wedding for which we’d been planning, the weekend of seeing relatives and friends.  My mind was set for a Big Event and couldn’t quite settle into the concept of quiet, daily rhythms again.

And yet, as much as these feeling swirled me in circles of rising anxiety, it all paled in comparison to the task ahead:  ferrying a three-year-old and an eleven-month-old to LAX, onto a plane for a four-and-a-half hour flight, and then into a car for another two-and-a-half hours to Asheville.  Thank goodness for Backyardigans DVD’s.

Our Day of Travel

In some ways, I understood that traveling with two small children was an advantage, a palliative against my usual end-of-vacation panic and self-pity.  Gotta look cheerful, I thought, as I raced through the house trying to maintain some sense of order whilst dividing items between checked bags, the diaper bag, Jake’s pink Dora the Explorer backpack (which, I am pleased to report, two of his guy friends greatly admired at school today), and the junk drawer of the green duffle bag.

I gave nary a thought to the winter coat I pulled out of the closet where it had rested for the entire trip and pretended I didn’t care that my feet were already sweating in wool socks and cowboy boots.  I pretended I was looking forward to sending the kids back to school even more than I was certain I was going to miss their constant company terribly.  And I emphatically agreed with Jake when he told me we were going to see our dogs that night because “we miss them.”  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t.  But I am enjoying the sight of both of them curled up in my office with me now.

With some amazement, I found myself settled in the rented minivan between the two car seats a full fifteen minutes before I had calculated we had to leave.  Plenty of time, I figured, for us to get both ourselves to our flight and Grandma to hers, which left, conveniently enough, at exactly the same time as ours but not, inconveniently enough, out of the same terminal.

Mike and I had hashed out a plan, though it was subject to constant change.  Should we curb-check our bags and leave me and the kids in our terminal while he dropped off his mother and returned the rental car?  Or should we park the car by our terminal, check our bags, and leave me and the kids while he and his mother walked to her terminal before he ran back to return the rental car?  “No, no,” I told him, “that’s not a short walk.”

These words, I admit, had as little appreciable effect on me as they did on him.

By the time we arrived and parked our car I was the one who suggested that after checking our bags we all walk Grandma to her terminal.  It wasn’t that I was scared to wait alone with the kids, an array of carry-ons, and the possibility of having to lug it all to a dirty bathroom at the whim of Jake’s, “I have to pee,” I told myself.  It was just such a beautiful day and I had to soak up those last bits of sunshine, a Vitamin D infusion that would carry me through the last weeks of winter.

And so we paraded to the curbside check-in, Mike pushing a luggage cart precariously loaded with suitcases and coats, Grandma holding Jake’s hand, and me taking up the rear with Lily in her stroller.  The sun shone pleasantly as we crossed the parking lot and squeezed into the elevator down to departure level.

And there we waited.  And waited.  And waited some more while Mike checked us in.  Something, he told me later, to do with the infant in the lap and having to reissue our tickets to accommodate her.  In response I muttered something about the airline making a killing on folks like us who reason that for an extra two dollars a bag it was worth not walking twenty feet to the check-in line inside the terminal.

Still, I figured it was only about 9:30 by the time he finished, leaving us a full two hours and fifteen minutes to accomplish the last three tasks on our LAX list:  delivering Grandma to her terminal, returning the minivan, and making it onto the plane, at which point we could worry about the next arguably more worrisome leg of the journey.

“What time is it?” I asked Grandma casually, as we smushed back into the elevator up to the top level of the parking lot, where we figured on crossing over to the other side of the LAX horseshoe.

“A little after ten,” she answered.

It would, in retrospect, have proven helpful if I hadn’t been quite so mellow, if a small chill had perhaps run through my veins, made me rethink the lovely walk along congested sidewalks to which I was still oddly looking forward.  But it didn’t.

Mellow I remained as we discovered that the top parking deck did not, in fact, connect to the terminal across from ours and made our way — luggage cart, three-year-old, Grandma, and stroller — back to the elevator and down a level.  There, we had a lovely trek across a parking garage, topped by what I hoped would be — for Jake at least — a thrilling walk across the pedestrian bridge over the cacophony of LA traffic.

Here we encountered our first, albeit minor, roadblock.

The elevator, it turned out, was broken.  An escalator beckoned.

Mike barely hesitated as he edged the luggage cart onto it and started down.  After him went Grandma and Jake.

I’d like to say I did not in fact start to back the stroller with Lily still in it toward the escalator, but I’m not sure I’d be telling the truth.  Either way, the airport employee who had directed us to the escalator said, with amazing calm for someone who had no doubt seen this happen before, “You should take the baby out.”

“Of course,” I said with what I hoped was the charming smile of someone who would never, ever try to take her baby down an escalator in a stroller, even in the heat of airport travel.

Finally deposited on the Grandma’s terminal side of the airport, we began to walk.  I watched the interminable Terminal 7 signs give way to Terminal 6.  Terminal 4, our destination terminal, remained far, far in the distance.

“It didn’t look this big when we parked,” Mike said, stating the obvious.

And still we trooped on, my stomach beginning to knot up as I ignored the passage of time.  Should I go ahead and get the kids on the plane even if Mike did not seem to be making it back from returning the rental car in time? I thought to myself.  What would we do if Mike missed the flight?  An unbidden memory of my mother begging the gate personnel to page my absent car-parking father as they held a flight for us sprang to my consciousness.  Panicky, I batted it away.

“I’m tired,” Jake practically cried.  I noted with horror that I had not thought to relieve him of his Dora backpack, weighing him down with DVD’s, a pasta dinner, and the coloring book a friend’s seven-year-old son had given him during the trip.

Even free of his backpack, Jake was struggling.  Mike valiantly lifted him up and pushed aside the Terminal 5 travelers with the luggage cart.  I checked on Grandma.  She was looking remarkably spry for an eighty-year-old woman.  I made a mental note to myself to keep her as my role model as I approach eighty.  Or, more immediately, at that very moment.

And then, finally, I saw it, a small lit number 4.  We charged toward it with renewed vigor.  Boiling over with efficiency, we checked Grandma’s bag and bid her goodbye at security.  Our little jaunt through LAX to enjoy the sunshine had taken at least forty-five minutes.

“I’m really worried about the time,” I said to Mike, this time assuming the mantle of the obvious.

“I’m going straight to the car,” he said, leaving me to fill in the blanks of getting the kids the rest of the way back to our terminal and through security.

I nodded like a corporal given her marching orders.  Never let them see you sweat.  “Should we just go back the way he came?”

It took only a small shake of Mike’s head to remind me of the broken elevator.

And so, grimly, we marched until we found a working elevator at a random spot somewhere between where we had been and where we needed to be.  Up to the top parking level we went.  Once there, time running like the sand out of an hourglass, we recalled that top deck parking does not connect across the LAX horseshoe.

Down a level we went, the sweat tingling in my armpits.  We were met with an array of parking ramps, all of them twisting dangerously as if to ward off any thoughts similar to my stroller on the escalator ones, only this time of dragging our children past screeching cars on foot.

Across Mike charged, to the opposite end of the parking garage.  Here I discovered two unsettling facts: 1) this parking garage did not connect to where we needed to be, and 2) the only way to get back to street level was to take the stairs.

Before I had fully absorbed these facts Mike strapped a few carry-ons over his shoulder, shoved the luggage cart in a corner, grabbed the stroller with the now-sleeping — and, amazingly, continuing-to-sleep — Lily in it, and, carrying it with adrenaline-fueled arms, started down the stairs.

Once on street level, we threaded our way across the back streets down which sped drivers who know the back streets and therefore expect to be able to drive really fast on them.  Jake, figuring we were lucky he had walked down the stairs without complaint, chose this moment to throw himself at his father’s leg while whining, “Pick me up.”

“You need to walk,” Mike said grimly through white lips.

“No!  Nooooo!” Jake yelled as Mike’s back disappeared from sight.  The fact that his mother was standing right next to him did nothing to ease the forlorn sound of Jake’s wail, as pitiful as when we really did lose him for a few minutes at the LA Zoo.

“Let’s go,” I said, watching from afar as I began to transform into the mother you see at the airport screaming at her child.

“Nooooo!” Jake repeated.

“All right, then you’re staying in Los Angeles,” I huffed, and walked off, leaving my poor, small child on the sidewalk.  It occurred to me that it’s one thing to make threats you can keep, like not being allowed to watch The Backyardigans, but that one plays a dangerous parenting game when one threatens to leave one’s child at LAX.

“Noooo!”  This one had a heart wrenching quality to it and Jake ran desperately toward us.  Mike grabbed him in his arms, and we struggled the last block or so to our terminal.

“I want to go with Dad,” Jake yelled the second we suggested splitting up so Mike could return the rental car.

We wasted precious minutes trying to reason with him — “We’ve already checked the car seat, honey,”  “Dad will catch up with us,”  “Mommy needs your help with Lily” — until I finally mustered up the old parental trick of bribery.  “How about we go to the terminal and get a chocolate chip cookie?” I suggested, perhaps the first person ever to feel relief at the ubiquity of Starbucks at airports because I knew it would provide me with a cookie.

It worked.  So enamored of the chocolate chip cookie idea was Jake that he was an amazing trooper as we made our way through security, Lily limp and sleeping in my arms as I removed her from and folded up the stroller, took shoes off and on, and contended with the alarm-raising empty thermos in my purse.

Happily, all this took so long that we spent only a few minutes admiring the planes taking off from the windows behind our gate before Mike caught up to us.  And, as if to assure me that I have not done anything so wrong in my life as to merit spending a transcontinental flight by myself with two very small children, the flight was delayed a bit.  I prefer to think of it as the Universe telling us there was no way Mike would miss the plane.

As we settled in and, gloriously, spread across two full rows — the horrible east coast storms benefiting us at the expense of all those Philadelphians who had to cancel their travel plans and leave empty seats for us — I began to think we had achieved a happy ending.  I even managed to get Lily to fall asleep for two glorious hours of — say it ain’t so! — reading.

And almost before we knew it, we were beginning our descent into the Charlotte airport.  But, like all journeys, ours was not yet at an end.

There Will Always Be Another Bump In the Road.  Or in the Air.

I noticed a bit of a commotion as the pilot instructed us to close our laptops.  Not, it appeared, that Jake was objecting to the end of his fest of Backyardigans DVD’s.  (Or, rather, the same Backyardigans DVD played over and over again.)  In fact, he seemed to be enjoying the sight of the Charlotte lights spread out beneath us.

So much was Jake enjoying the scenery, in fact, that he was loathe to give it up.  Even if it meant, say, sitting down and buckling his seat belt.

“I can’t do it,” Mike yelled to me.  As the plane zoomed earthward, we exchanged the baby in the air over the aisle, popped off our own seat belts, and switched places.

“Jake, you have to sit down,” I breathed in his ear.  “Did you hear the captain?”

“Noooooo!!!” It was as if all of Jake’s previous LAX no’s had gathered force, determined not to be cajoled aside this time.

Feeling for all the world like a bad disaster movie, I bodychecked my child into his seat.

“Nooo!!!” he screamed into the ears of the — thank you gods above — family with small children sitting in front of us.  “DON’T BUCKLE ME!” he shrieked as I somehow managed to do just that.

It was one of those moments of pure, primal mothering, an animalistic protecting of one’s offspring.  I wrapped my arms around his body to prevent him from tearing off his seat belt and springing to his feet.  He cried, he kicked, he yelled.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.  It sounds like a stupid question only to someone who does not have a three-year-old.

“I don’t want a seat belt,” Jake sobbed.

“Why?” I asked.  “Didn’t you hear the captain say to put on our seat belts?  It’s like the car.  It’s very, very dangerous not to wear one.”

Jake sobbed again as I pressed my temple to his.  I felt the plane bank and, from his line of sight, could make out the lights of the city growing closer.

“Look!” I cried with a sense of the wonder a three-year-old must feel looking out a plane window as it lands.

Jake looked up.  I could feel the tension whoosh out of his body with his next exhale, the three-year-old wonder fill up the empty space left behind.  “We’re landing!” he cried with excitement.

And so we did as I cradled my seat belted boy against my body.  “Wait for the bump!” I whispered.  “That’s when we’ll be on the ground!”

He laughed when we felt it, a gentle, soft bump, like the kind we feel all the time in our lives, even when we don’t think of ourselves as traveling.

Meditate on the Bumps

I won’t draw out the analogy at the risk of annoying anyone who has bothered to read this far and is as exhausted by the telling of my journey as I was by the making of it.  But isn’t literal travel a bit of a metaphor for the journey we take in life?

Think about it.  The moments of panic when you must achieve what appears to you as a concrete, unmovable goal — the flight departure.  The calm sense of self-satisfaction you feel when everything is in order and  you have nothing to do but wait — the early arrival to the gate.  The feeling of purpose as someone else steers you in the direction you have chosen, followed by a vague sense of panic when you realize that the flight may end but you still have a long way to go until your head hits the pillow.

For a long time — since college — I have had travel dreams.  They started my senior year, when the theme was buses.  I was on a bus and didn’t know where I was.  Everyone I knew was on the bus and I got off, all alone.  I was missing the bus.

As I began to find my footing in life, to feel my path, the buses gave way to airplanes.  Struggling to make the plane.  Making the plane only to find out I didn’t know where I would land.  Always lost.  Always trying desperately to make it somewhere.

And then, some time over the past couple of years, with my kids, the dreams have stopped.  I’m not rushing anywhere.  I don’t have a destination in mind.  I have two small beings to watch, each day a wonder to them, their minds blank of any sense of purpose beyond Lily’s goal of picking up that Cheerio on the table in front of her and Jake’s of making sure he gets Cheerios too if Lily is having them.

YogaMamaMe is, largely, supposed to be about what my children teach me.  And yet even this I sometimes forget.

And so, I thank them for the complications they bring to literal journeys — the extra packing and the snacks and bottles to be planned and the fact that neither of them will sit for four hours reading a book until the day when my own eyesight is so poor that I will have to give up the books and have them entertain me on flights to Los Angeles.

Because these complications are nothing more than life.  Little bumps when you land, bigger bumps when you are running late and stranded in the middle of a parking garage at LAX.  Bumps that are, in fact, a whole lot more difficult to scale when you have yourself convinced that there is a resting place on the other side.  Because, in fact, there isn’t.

You may get a good night’s sleep when finally you arrive home and get the kids into pajamas and into bed.  But in the morning there’s life again, with new bumps and new journeys awaiting.

The Meditation

My yoga teacher offered this thought in today’s class, a perfect compliment, I think, to the bump of our plane touching down in Charlotte.  I offer it here as a longer meditation to take when you have some moments in which to clear your head and take a look at where you are in your journey.

Think of yourself on a boat, going down a river.  If you bump into an empty boat, you think nothing of it.  It’s a bump and you move on.

But if you find yourself bumping up against a boat with someone in it, suddenly it becomes an annoyance, an irritant.  Your path feels blocked and frustration and anger bubble up.

Meditate on this difference.  Begin to get to the root of what it is that makes anger and frustration bubble up in you.

And as you discover this source, resolve to move through life as if every boat you bump is empty.