Maybe it's easier for people who don't like to travel
A theory and thoughts on expectations
[01.30.24] Today, what my editor (Joe) called “one of the most honest pieces you have written.” Whether you’re pre or post kids, whether you love or don’t love travel - I’d be curious your opinion on this topic.
I’ve come up with a theory.
Years ago, I would do my best thinking on planes. Uninterrupted time up in the air created a vacuum of positive force for my brain to hum out new ideas and mull over old ones.
On field visits around the country for Giorgio Armani, business flights were sacred hours to think through life’s questions - my career path included. On vacation, I’d fill up pages of my notebooks, pay full attention to a podcast, quietly read a book, or take a nap - which I now recognize as the ultimate in-flight luxury post-kid.
Traveling with my daughter brings its own kind of inspiration, but I haven’t so much as finished a movie on a plane since she’s been on board. Those uninterrupted lengths of deep thought are for another season.
So I surprised myself on a recent flight, the twenty-seventh with my daughter, when I came up with a novel thought deserving of proper pondering.
I was thinking about all of my friends who love to travel and who are on the precipice of having kids.
Joe and I happen to be one of the first couples to become parents in our groups of friends in New York and Los Angeles. I was thinking about how our friends would experience this flight (Airpods in, ignoring the person next to them) compared with how I was experiencing it (with my two favorite people - husband and daughter - but exhausted, overstimulated and mentally calculating how many puffs are appropriate for a toddler to eat in a single day).
The theory I came up with is that traveling after kids may actually be easier for people who don’t like to travel.
Why? Well, when you are a person who loves travel, you have positive expectations of what travel will be.
My expectations included how to navigate an airport, headphones on, not hauling much more than a carry on bag and a travel magazine.
My expectations included hopping on a redeye for a two-week business trip to Milan and tacking on a solo jaunt to Switzerland afterwards, just for fun. And flying as a standby passenger to Portugal with inexpensive, last-minute, first class seats thanks to my generous friend who works for the airline. And meandering around the perimeter of Cartagena’s walled city for hours, my hand holding Joe’s and his holding a can of Club Colombia.
What do these expectations have in common? Freedom and, frankly, a focus on myself.
People who travel frequently have a process. They have accumulated years of familiarity with airports, train stations, getting around new places, hotels and Airbnbs, and planning trips in general.
The jarring part is not traveling with kids, in and of itself. It’s how different traveling with kids is than traveling without them.
It’s the colossal delta between, on the one hand, showing up to the airport with only a carry on bag, and, on the other hand, showing up with a checked bag, stroller, car seat, diaper bag, pump bag, and a carry on bag.
It is not simply that you have a bunch of stuff to carry. It’s that you used to be able to do the same trip with one bag, not six plus a baby strapped to you!
So, in that moment of clarity I had on the plane recently, I wondered about the people who never really cared for travel to begin with. Who think traveling is neutral at best. Those who find the whole experience annoying and for whom travel is a means to an end.
I wonder whether, for them, adding kids to the picture just takes an experience they already don’t love and makes it something a degree more difficult to navigate. The change isn’t so recognizable because it’s all net negative.
Versus those of us for whom travel is an inextricable part of our lifestyle. Who consider time in flight sacred. Who have our carry on packing strategy down to a science. The ones for whom adding a baby turns travel from a known entity into an unknown one.
This is not a comparison of types of people, those who love travel versus those who don’t love it. Instead, it’s a reflection on the experience of taking something that has been ever-present in our adult lives up until this point: the ability to get on a plane and go, and adding to it the one experience that changes everything: parenthood.
I certainly haven’t let the challenge of it all stop me.
In the end, my love for travel is a motivating factor and makes going places with a child comprehensible. But when an acquaintance recently said to me, “you make it look so easy,” I was baffled because nothing about traveling with a small child has been easy. Compared to traveling before kids, it’s been so hard.
In becoming a parent, I have thought a lot about the delta between how things were and how they are now.
I’ve realized that I’m thankful for the love of travel I cultivated beforehand. It is this innate connection to experiencing foreign places that has made it fathomable to pack my pump bag with its thousand parts, to wait for TSA while they screen our bottles and formula, to comfort a crying baby countless times on a plane and to keep on doing it over and over again.
It means we get to watch fish swim at our feet while the three of us bask in the clear waters of the Mediterranean, it means we get to hug family in every corner of the country, and it means we get to keep the dream of the next destination alive.
I can only hope my daughter is this determined to keep doing something she loves after a seismic shift inevitably occurs in her future.
I hope she finds the things in life that she believes are worth doing, even if they require a new perspective.
I hope to prove to her that by sticking with the things that matter, even after they take the shape of something unrecognizable, they will become known to you again.
And maybe I’m hoping for that proof, too.
Thank you for reading! Know someone who travels, has kids or is thinking about having them? I’d appreciate if you’d send Carry On their way!
p.s. you can always see all posts on the website
I love this piece from you-- and this sentiment! I kept thinking on my last trip home (long haul, for a family event, without the kids) how much easier it all was, and the bar I had set the past 8 years (everything's so much easier solo!), but there's just something missing when your favorite people can't be there with you. Still, I savored the alone time and leaned in to being 100% present while I was there, knowing they'll come back with me when the time is right. Thanks for this!
I’ve certainly found that my biggest struggles have always been the resistance within *myself.* It’s always the warring “this is new and I like the old way better” always plants discontent.
There are so many who throw their hands up in the air that traveling with (young) kids is so hard and sometimes I’m tempted into doing the same. But I know if I stop, I’ll lose yet another part of myself in this new role and I just can’t let that happen. Especially since I’ve always wanted so eagerly to share travels with my baby. So muck on we shall and the memories will outweigh the hard parts.