I’ve done some impulsive things in my life, and perhaps one of the most impulsive of all was booking tickets from California to Texas when my son was nine days old so he could visit his daddy. We arrived at the tiny airport at 3am and I embarked on a weekend trip to Texas–on my own. With a newborn.
What was I thinking?
The trip was fantastic and my son traveled like a dream (now that he’s a toddler flying with him made me almost want to give up traveling for good) but I look back on those first four months of my son’s life when I traveled all over the world with an infant, mostly by myself, and I question my sanity.
Twenty hours after my son’s miracle of a birth, my Marine husband boarded a plane and left for Texas, where he would spend the next four months at a training school, and we thought we were saying goodbye to him for the duration of the time. I cried–oh, how many tears I cried–and two days later when I left the hospital and cocooned in the tiny guest room a family from church was putting me up in (since I moved out of our apartment at 38 weeks pregnant) there was such a loneliness I knew I couldn’t do the stay-in-bed-and-rest thing.
So I didn’t rest. At all, really.
When my son was three days old, we went out for the first time to the farmer’s market, where it took me an hour just to get out of the car due to being a first time mom with no idea what I was doing, and then I walked around in 40 degree Northern California weather for an hour while everyone I encountered told me I was crazy. There seemed to be so much to do, and on top of all of it I had a trip to Malaysia planned tentatively to see my brother graduate from high school, and I was leaving as soon as I possibly could.
That involved hours on the phone with county clerks and multiple drives to different cities in attempt to get my son’s birth certificate ASAP, then the day after I got his birth certificate I booked flights for Sunday and a sweet young mom from church with four kids of her own drove me two hours up to San Francisco so I could get to the only agency that could get my son a passport in two days. I put in the passport application on Thursday and on Friday, the very next day, the same mom packed up her van with her four kids and did the four hour round trip with me again so I could get his passport. I arrived and picked up the passport with minutes to spare before the office closed for the weekend–and my flight left Sunday, so those minutes were the difference between going to Malaysia and not going to Malaysia.
When my son was fifteen days old, we boarded his fifth airplane (he had already been on four on the way to Texas and back) and I flew to Malaysia by myself with a newborn. I arrived exhausted, in desperate need of a shower, and feeling like a super mom.
My younger brother graduated from high school a few days later and after two weeks in Malaysia, we boarded yet another plane and flew back to the US, thankfully this time on the same flight as my family who were coming back to spend the summer in New Mexico.
It was five weeks of insanity, traveling all over the world on my own, with an infant and without my husband. And yet somehow I wasn’t tired. I never felt stressed or overwhelmed, which I think was really by the grace of God, who didn’t want me to become an insane mom while my husband was gone for months due to military orders. I also had all my oils that helped my son sleep at night, sleep on the airplane, sleep always–and when your baby sleeps, it makes all the difference. Now that I have two kids, I know it’s not a coincidence! She sleeps too, thank you Lavender and Peace&Calming! Plus I had oils for my raging postpartum hormones which didn’t rage at all, thanks to this bomb oil called Clary Sage. Look it up; it’s the real deal.
Here’s the thing: I also scheduled my son, starting from the day he was born, so he wasn’t nursing willy-nilly and I could plan going out around when I knew he needed to eat. His schedule + the oils helped him sleep great and I decided before he was born that I couldn’t be uptight about germs and others holding him or I would be insane, and to this day we are still very laid back about dirt and germs and going out and it’s allowed us to continue to travel and make plans regularly without it being completely overwhelming.
When my son was four months old, I packed up our car and he and I drove from Albuquerque, NM to Broken Bow, OK where I finally reunited with the love of my life, and we spent fifty hours driving all over the US visiting friends and family before settling into the house we had bought without ever having seen it in person at our new duty station in North Carolina.
It was craziness and yet I don’t regret a moment of it. My son had experienced more than some adults by the time he was a month old and when I look back on that period of my life, I don’t think of exhaustion and stress, I simply feel like a super mom.
I can’t believe I did that.
When I decided to write about the postpartum period of time with my son, I didn’t imagine it would become nothing but a story of our adventures, but that’s what I remember. I can conjure up memories of hours in a rocking chair, trying not to cry over his cluster feeding; I can vaguely remember trying to figure out how to support his tiny body in the tub and wash his hair at the same time; and my body still remembers the ache of sitting on a hard chair in those first few days.
The memories of wishing my husband was there to see his son smile for the first time and to keep me company in the middle of the night are strong. But strongest are the crazy adventures, the what was I thinking? stories.
I’m pretty sure I was partially crazy but that’s what made it truly some of the best four months of my life.
Two years later, my son is no longer little, there’s a new baby in the family, and I’m postpartum all over again. Gosh, I love it. Kids are great. (Usually.)
Check out all three parts of the series on my son’s birth here!
Part one, the pregnancy: Almost two years since the pregnancy that made me want to die
Part two, the delivery: “Is he supposed to look like that?!”
Part three, postpartum: Ten airplanes by five weeks old: postpartum and alone with my son
