As the newly minted veteran of a cross-country plane flight solo with 2 kids under age 4 (12 hours door to door from Maine to California including 6 straight in the air, thanks for asking), I’ve got some serious wisdom to drop. There’s a lot of good advice out there about what to pack for your kids, yourself, your neighbors—this is more abstract.
Lesson 1: Acknowledge your needs.
Maybe before you had kids you took deep satisfaction in moving smoothly, efficiently, through the airport. You brought only carryon luggage, tucked your liquids and electronics in an outside pocket to sail through security, and packed a compact and nutritious lunch to avoid paying airport prices. You arrived at the gate with time to spare, stepped out of the aisle promptly, and settled in to your seat with a good magazine and noise cancelling headphones.
Traveling with kids will not be the same. Sure, there are things you can do to make the trip smoother—bring snacks and toys, carry big zip-top bags stocked with just the essentials for an in-flight diaper change, load up your phone with cartoons and baby games, bring a baby carrier. But you will have needs, and they will be visible. This can make you mad, or this can remind you that all people have needs, that we all require accommodation, that it is not our duty to disappear.
Lesson 2: Accept help.
Traveling with kids is an exercise in humility. Am I physically capable of lifting my own suitcase? Absolutely. Can I lift three suitcases at once while also holding a wriggling, shrieking one-year-old and preventing a three-year-old from running backwards through the security checkpoint? Maybe not so much.
My favorite thing about moving through the world with kids is how it connects me to those around me. When I walk with my son in my arms, strangers’ eyes soften at his smiles. They stop to tell me stories about when their children were babies. And every time I’ve traveled with kids, I’ve been offered warmth from fellow travelers.
Yes, there will probably be some snide looks from judgmental jerks who are convinced that their coach ticket somehow entitles them to perfect airborne tranquility. But for every dudebro with Bose headphones there will be a grandmother who holds your baby so you can wash your hands, a lanky teenager who hoists your bag into the overhead compartment, a been-there-done-that dad who expertly folds and stows your stroller for you at the bottom of the jetway. Humans live in service to one another; when you travel with kids you must perform this service, but you may also receive it.
Lesson 3: Let the worst moment pass.
Let’s be realistic: If you’re traveling with kids, there will be a worst moment. Maybe your kid will scream nonstop during take-off, or throw a fit because he doesn’t want to leave the plane before all the luggage is unloaded, or knock over a stranger’s coffee cup onto their lap, or try to push his brother’s stroller down the escalator. Maybe the baby will puke on you. Maybe you will puke on the baby. Even if nothing particularly dramatic happens, you will probably feel tired, and frustrated, and stressed.
This likely won’t be worse than the dread and anticipation you feel before leaving your home. On one of our trips, the worst moment was during the bus ride to the airport, when for 45 minutes the baby shrieked at earsplitting volume and the toddler screamed at him to be quiet unless both were at that precise moment actively chewing fruit snacks. (Ask me what 45 minutes’ worth of fruit snacks looks like.) On another, it was while getting dressed to leave, when the kids took turns ripping their shoes off and running toward traffic as I tried to load up the suitcases.
Those moments were objectively bad, but they felt much worse because we still had so much travel ahead of us. Had I let them pass with equanimity, the day would have felt much easier.
These lessons from flight—acknowledge your needs, accept help, let the worst moments pass--are the lessons of childbirth, too, and of parenting as a whole, and I suppose of being a human. In Go Went Gone, Jenny Espenbeck writes,
How many times… must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough?
Even if a human lifetime isn’t, a 12-hour solo trip with two toddlers probably is. Happy studying.