Sickland, Many

Being a pandemic mom honestly has a few perks. I got to be home the entire time I was pregnant with Aria for over a year. And we got to spend her first year of life essentially in a bubble. For Rio, we got the perks of no one being in the hospital room with us and choosing his exposure to new people, but we were so over the fucking pandemic and had an antsy toddler, so we were leaving the house for walks almost every day.

And boy, did we miss travel.

If you read my earlier post, “From the Beginning,” you’ll know that I signed up for motherhood but was really struggling with letting go of travel and balancing motherhood with my lifestyle. We decided that we would somehow make it work. We were committed to it.

Right after Rio was born, my husband kept saying, “the only way we’ll get better at leaving the house with two is if we keep doing it.”

After he was sleeping through the night, we decided we would start with baby steps in traveling. A night or two here, a two-hour flight here, a four-night stay here, a four-hour flight there, and eventually, we’d get better at it and then be able to make it to Greece in the summer without a hitch. Or so I kept telling myself.

The first time you do it, though, naturally, anything that can go wrong does. We decided our first trip would be super short—a few nights in Portland, Maine. My brother-in-law was going to be in town, and he loves breweries, so we decided to brewery hop in Portland.

The anticipation was palpable the day before we left. I was so fucking excited to be going, literally anywhere but home, but also so incredibly nervous about going anywhere with a not-even two-year-old and a six-month-old.

Normally my neurotic ass mess would be planning every damn detail. There would be lists, labels, stickers, you name it, in an effort to feel in control of the wildly uncontrollable life of a mom of two under two. I would’ve made an end goal for what would be the “ideal” vacation, and backward plan all the skills my kids needed to make my weekend “ideal” and then teach them…crazy lady over here (can’t take the teacher out of the mama 😂).

I started a plan. The sleeping arrangements made me most nervous. How the heck were we all going to share a room together?! Was I really about to pay for a hotel and get no fucking sleep?! Were BOTH of my children somehow going to make it through the night together in one room?! Would they be fucking miserable the next day?!

But once I was done with my maternity leave and started working again, everything went to shit. I could no longer even fucking remember that we were going anywhere, let alone plan to teach my children the skills I thought THEY NEEDED to spend the night somewhere other than home. Instead, I just decided to, uncharacteristically, wing it. We packed all of what we thought were the necessities (more on that in a later post) and made our way to Maine. We make our first stop at our first brewery. Hallelujah! As I take my first sip of that fabulous crisp lager and watch my toddler smell the mums planted outside and talk to the pumpkins, I see it. At first, I thought I was mistaken. I thought, “Nah, that can’t be possible,” and “she definitely just has something on her lips.” But the closer I got to her, the more I noticed it. Snot. Fucking Snot. The little shit was getting sick. Not even one HOUR into our trip, she already had a runny nose.

You see, while the pandemic was beneficial to my family for some things, it epically failed when coming to preparing my children for any kind of germs in the world (and obviously all the other ways it has sucked too). My mom watches both of my children. They legit NEVER get out of the fucking house except for when we take them out on the weekends. Their immune systems are grossly premature.

What kind of sick twisted game was the universe playing on me? I just wanted one fucking weekend. One weekend to feel like I could go on trips with my family and maybe have some semblance of my past life come with me. And here I was, the taste of elusive travel possibility in my future, and the one glistening drip stands in my way.

Welcome to REAL parenthood: the kind where all your travel expectations are thwarted by the common cold