Why I travel with my kids

Why do I travel with my kids?  I have been asking myself this question a lot over the past five days. On the surface, the answers are obvious: experiencing the world through their unjaded eyes, encouraging them to seek out new experiences, enjoying the camaraderie of a shared adventure.  Yet, as we wind through our summer tour of the hot and humid states, I'm finding these reasons lacking the inspiration that I need to make it through some of the more challenging moments.

For those times when I find myself dragging a screaming child off the beach, negotiating blanket placement between two kids unaccustomed to bed-sharing, or pulling off the highway for a bathroom break 15 minutes after the previous bathroom break, I have come up with these less obvious, possibly more compelling benefits to travelling with my children.

I am forced to face my fears.

Though I nearly wept a of couple weeks ago when I had to bring Little E to the foul composting toilet at our beach at home, life on the road demands that I put aside my long held belief that every surface in a public bathroom is coated in a microscopic layer of the fecal matter of dirty strangers.  I cannot help but quietly chant my public bathroom mantra: Don't touch anything; don't touch anything.  But when Little E asked at a Delaware rest area whether she could touch the floor with the bottoms of her shoes, I told her okay --and I didn't even attempt to sterilize her Crocs when we got to the hotel.


I learn new things about my children --and myself.

Some of the little foibles that my children have displayed this week are harmless. Little E has decided that she is a dog and bought herself a dog bandanna in the bookstore of my alma mater (and wore said bandanna to dinner). Big E likes to practice figure skating moves as we walk down city sidewalks. These little quirks may not be particularly fashion forward or convenient for fellow pedestrians, but I actually find them kind of endearing.  That the lack of Radio Disney in the rental car brings my daughters to tears and that my choosing to leave on a station with "grown up music" is received as a personal insult, is much more concerning and shall be addressed. That I will endure an entire Bonnie Raitt song despite my own distaste for it simply because I enjoy watching both girls scream angrily and cover their ears? That probably needs some exploration as well.

I gain new (more accurate?) perspectives on myself.

The other day as I attempted to cull some of the 200 shots already on my camera, I came across one of myself sitting by the edge of the children's pool at the beach down the street from my in-laws.  My shoulders were slightly slumped and the bathing suit that had looked so strategic in the mirror at home was not living up to its promise. I just barely stopped myself from wailing to my husband, "I look like someone's mother!" Ludicrous, I know, that this is so upsetting, as I have been someone's mother for over seven years now. As the trip went on, my earth shattering revelation that I do in fact look like someone's mother was further cemented by the fact that I carried a purse stuffed with two handfuls of broken and melting restaurant crayons and a barrel of Wet Ones.  Then, the other day in Richmond Little E recoiled in horror as I dressed for the day. "Not that dress!  Don't put on that dress with the flowers!," she cried mortified. 

I ignored her pleas spent the morning in sensible shoes and a flowered dress with a camera case hanging from my shoulder and a mega pack of wipes in my bag, looking every bit like someone's mother at the campus where I long ago wore tight jeans and cute heels carried no more than a lipstick in my pocket .

I'm hoping that these new insights will see me through the rest of the trip, but there are still six days, one flight, 500 miles in the car and countless public toilets to come.  Wish me luck.

Dream: For my girls, on the close of another year

I was raised without religion and as a result, my knowledge of The Bible is basic at best. Yet at this time of year I reflect on my cobbled understanding of the Christmas story, and I feel a rush of recognition; though I'm pretty sure this is sacrilegious, I find communion in the story of a woman who, in the dark stillness of a December night, experiences a miracle of birth and light. 

It happened to me, too.  Twice.

Big E emerged into the December darkness to make me a mother seven years ago.  I labored for 24 hours, battered by the pain but unrelenting in my determination to have a drug-free birth.  In the last late night hours before Big E was born, I was delirious with pain and fatigue, moaning to the midwife, over and over like a mantra, "I'm dying; you're killing me."

When my husband and I headed to the hospital through a cold, dark December night four years ago, I thought they'd probably send us home.  Though the contractions were coming a minute apart, they were nowhere near as crushing as I remembered from Big E's birth.  No longer as rigid in my convictions, I was open to an epidural this time around, but the opportunity never presented itself.  Little E was born 45 minutes after we arrived at the hospital, to the sound of the Christmas carols our nurse had switched on in the birthing room.

Their personalities often seem as polar as the circumstances of their births.  Big E, on turning seven, has graduated from little kid status to just plain kid and scolds her sister for talking too loudly while she's trying to read, which she does almost ceaselessly.  Little E, now just about four, still hangs on my leg to be carried.  When I tell her she's too big, she pouts that she's just a little baby and I give in, wishing she were right, still loving her clinging presence on my hip.  While good girl Big E stands rod straight and loudly enunciates a line from the Daisy Scout Promise to the crowd at her investiture ceremony, comedienne Little E, slumped on my lap, slaps her forehead and moans, "Oh brother, this is taking forever," to the amused agreement of the parents around us.

I never could have known seven years ago what my children would be to me.  How could I have realized they would render me at once so immune and so vulnerable?  Their existence blunts the stings and throbs of my daily life, yet even the tiniest harms they encounter sear my heart.  They are my beacon, the beam that guides me, that filtered through the gray haze of hormones and sleep deprivation after Big E's birth and burned through the dusky gloom of my work troubles last year.  If they are okay, my world is okay; thus, I must always make my world okay so that they will be, too.

I cry nearly every time I have to clear their drawers of outgrown clothes, reminiscing over every chocolate stained T-shirt and threadbare pair of jeans, and yet I thrill at every new stage, every little skill mastered, every small step taken.  I hate that we have moved through another year, but I would never want to miss knowing the women they will become.

And bittersweet as it is to mark a year gone, I know that as long as my girls are anywhere in this world there will be light in mine.

Dream: The baby season

For the past seven years, this time of year, when the nights grow chillier and the foliage is blunted from scorching to rusted, has brought my mind to the same place.  More than harvest or Halloween, these late days of autumn are, to me, the baby season.

 On Halloween, 2003 my husband and I sat on the stoop of the house where we had a tiny second-floor condo.  I had been pregnant with Big E since early that spring, but it had been an anxiety-ridden pregnancy full of scares and complications, and it wasn't until a neighbor asked that night about my due date that I allowed myself to realize that I was, indeed, a pregnant lady, that in a few weeks we would have a baby. 

Three years later, on the same night, Big E, as a fairy princess, and I, eight months pregnant, trick-or-treated around our new neighborhood where we had our own house and no longer shared a stoop.  The baby who would be Little E was due in mid-December, one day after Big E's third birthday, and I reminded myself that I really was a pregnant lady and that soon that squirmimg, kicking hump in my middle would be a swaddled baby who would grow into a tiny person like its sister.

When the baby season comes, I think of these Halloweens and of the two December nights when I struggled and pushed and screamed my girls into being.  And I think of the bubbly anticipation of all the nights between, of knowing what was coming, but not exactly, of knowing when it was coming, but not for sure.  I don't think about the skyrocketing blood pressure of both my pregnancies, those painfully urgent and undecipherable infant screams, the gray post-partum lows, the sad sibling lurking in the background.  I don't think about the days when I feel like I might drown in all of the tears and scowls, the no fairs, the why nots, the she always get everythings. 

I do think about doing it all again.  I think about the sleepy babies nursing and stroking my hair, about toothless smiles and little hands grabbing my fingers.  I think about the drawings that say I love Mom, about little sneakers skipping along next to mine, and about giggling girls burrowing into bed with us on weekend mornings.

Then I remember: our home and our cars are at capacity with two children.  If our finances are strained now, what would happen when we started a new round of daycare payments, not to mention adding a third college tuition?  And, above all,  we are happy and unspeakably lucky to have the healthy, hilarious, lovely girls that we do.  Would a third enhance this or throw it all into chaos? 

If I were to have maintained the clean symmetry that I achieved in spacing the girls nearly three years to the day, year folding neatly over year like a paper fan, I would have trick-or-treated with a baby on my hip this year.  While neither my husband nor I can slam the door on the possibility of one more, with each day we are watching it slowly close on its own.

Yet, every once in a while, especially now in the baby season,  I reach back and stay that door, if only for a while.