A few months ago, I took my first solo trip with LA to visit some friends. Armed with the knowledge that my own mother had done many trips of longer duration with two children, not just one, I was confident I would overcome any potential challenges with ease. In retrospect, I realise my mother and I never had an actual conversation about any of those trips. She had a particularly intense hatred for the Detroit Metro Airport, which I knew was based on flying through there, going through customs and being left with two small children, ripped open luggage and no one to help. Beyond that, she was the personification of strength and control when travelling. My mother was the type of person to micromanage a trip down the last detail, although my guess now is she learned to be the micromanager from that early experience in the Detroit airport.

Not being a micromanager myself, I assumed it would be exponentially easier since I would go with the flow as it were. I set up a 5-day trip. How hard could it be? I was going back to somewhere I used to live to see people I knew who wanted to meet my baby. Only 4 and a half hours of air time total, one stop at Chicago O’Hare, an airport I know like the back of my hand. Easy.

False.

LA is a miracle baby in many ways, from arrival to health to magnetic personality. But it appears he has terrible travel luck. Although I had taken this exact flight many times, never with a delay, we were delayed going and returning. There was plenty of rough air—what they now call turbulence, I assume because “rough air” doesn’t have the scary connotations of “turbulence” yet. Unlike the earlier flights when he was a tiny infant, LA did not feel compelled to nap once in the airplane. He did feel a need to jump incessantly in my lap, bite everything around him despite us being in the middle of a pandemic and, at one particularly excruciating point, he managed to grab the hair of the lovely lady sitting next to us. There was far more to that trip, most of it negative, but I came out of it with some important questions to help next overly optimistic traveller do better than I did. Although I’m not sure there is a way to do better. I think it’s mostly about survival.

First decision: The car seat. Do you gate check it? It’s safer for the car seat, but you have to carry a baby, a backpack and a car seat around an airport. What about sending it to the luggage hold? That could lead to damage. Final answer: repurpose the stroller pram pack and use an entire roll of bubble wrap to protect the seat. It worked. Good decision.

Second decision: Layover time. Do you pick the shorter time so your child spends less time in travel and potentially avoids losing his mind in a small tin can? Or do you pick the longer layover so you have time for a leisurely stroll and change in a family bathroom? Don’t be like me. I picked the shorter time. Of course, for a solo traveller, or even adult travellers, a quick rush from one terminal to another is a piece of cake and saves having to sit around in the airport deciding if you do or do not want an overpriced bag of trail mix. Except LA got us delayed so much that we almost missed that second flight. Quick rushes with babies pump your body full of stress hormones, force your body to perform feats it really should not attempt, and leave you feeling like you just climbed through a garbage can. Bad decision.

More useful tips.

Dress for success, not to impress. Feeding babies on flights is like cleaning out the horse stalls in a barn. By the time the flights were over, I was covered in puffs, fruit and substances I couldn’t even recognize. Similarly, avoid bringing food like fruit on airplanes. Stick with dry options. LA loves fruit, but he also loves throwing it around.

Do not sacrifice your mental hygiene for physical hygiene concerns. Option a: you keep the baby clean, off the floor, away from germs. Consequence: he screams on the flight. Option b: you let the baby risk contagion, crawl on the floor with him and try to head off any attempts to lick the floor. Consequence: he naps on the flight or at least coos quietly. If you value your life, choose option b. Your fellow passengers are not the kind, patient people you would hope they would be.

All considered, LA was a stand-up little guy. He charmed his way through three of four flights despite his noise level and on one flight even garnered compliments on his behaviour. I attribute this partly to him having a personality and smile that compels a more charitable attitude out of the grouchiest individuals.

Still, I would be nowhere without mindfulness, in this case mindful gratitude.

Gratitude has been an ongoing practice for years. It often takes the form of adding a line to my journal about something I am grateful for that day. Sometimes, when life is particularly hard, I will try to speak it out loud, making it more concrete and tangible. I can’t pinpoint when I began this, but it may be one of the more positive results of my childhood: I’m deeply aware of my privilege, and I have little problem admitting it.

In difficult situations, though, there is no time for journaling, so my process works something like this: Feeling stressed? Anxious? Take a breath, look around, note the sounds, the objects around, then try to think of one thing I am grateful for in this moment. It seems simple, but it’s not as easy as it seems when you’re struggling to breathe. If you can manage to do it, however, it does help. Or at least that has been my experience.

On this particularly difficult trip, when LA had had enough of everything after being delayed nearly 2 hours, and we were tossing about in a tin can somewhere over the Great Lakes, I grabbed hold of that mindfulness practice like those yellow life preservers the flight attendants buckle on during the safety demonstrations. As LA shrieked in annoyance and tried to twist his body enough to bang the chair in front of us with his feet, I took a deep breath, focused on the sounds of the engines, the air above my head. My breath slowed, even as my grip on LA continued, and suddenly the haze cleared. I was able to remember the many flights spent watching other mothers struggle with their children and hoping that would one day be my story. Here I was. That longing had become my reality. My entire mood shifted from worrying that he was bothering people to being grateful he existed. An additional bonus was that my mood shifted his mood, and he switched from shrieking to laughing. It was still loud but far more delightful.

Long story short. Mindfulness matters. This does not mean I am eager to do this again any time soon. In fact, LA’s godmother requested I take a trans-atlantic flight to visit her. She has never travelled with a child on an airplane, and it shows. I told her we would have to wait.

The post Mindful Travel first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Currently, LA is obsessed with textures. He pats everything with his hand, testing it to see if it’s hard, rubbing it if it’s grainy; although I wince when he decides it’s a suitable option for tasting, I try to restrain myself from stopping him. He’s particularly drawn to wood and brick, to scratching at it with his little nails. When he encounters a new texture somewhere he turns to me with a look of delight as if saying, “Mom! Isn’t this amazing?” 

One of my commitments to being present in his life is not using my cellphone while on walks with him.  I want to see what he sees, point out the birds, the leaves, anything I would not notice otherwise. I want to interact with him, not someone else, to enact what Tara Brach calls “the only way to live,” which is to see every minute as an “unrepeatable miracle.”

This does not come naturally to me, nor to anyone these days I imagine. I have a Type A personality, which means I need to accomplish things, to end my day feeling as if I moved something forward. As a child, I spent most of my time in my head, planning what I would do when I finally escaped the bonds of isolation and authoritarianism, when I would leave home and be free. Although adulthood and freedom has not turned out to be quite the same as I imagined it would be, I still have a tendency to keep that mindset of thinking about what’s next instead of what is now. The gift of LA in my life is to shift me out of future planning, grounding me in the present, because he lives in the pure present, and unwittingly forces me to do the same. 

This is mindfulness in action: learning to live in the present, to experience what is, not what is not yet. To live in the present, I’m learning, involves letting go over and over again. Letting go of control. Of outcomes. Of attachments. As much as I tried to embrace this concept for years, it wasn’t until LA came into my life that I found a guide to enacting this process. By watching LA be present, I am learning how to do the same for myself. 

Down the street from the house, there is a “creek.” Because this particular street makes a good loop for a quick walk, we pass by it often. Before LA sees the creek, he hears it, and his eyes light up with excitement. He cranes his neck around the side of the stroller until the water comes into view; he stares down in fascination. 

This is not a beautiful creek in any way. It’s actually a runoff to keep the neighbourhood from flooding, a serious problem in an area with mountains and a great deal of rainfall. The water swirls around concrete chunks left over from some building project along with the leaves, rocks, tree branches; LA takes it all in as if it were a miracle, the manmade and the natural. His perspective is radically different from my own. His curiousity is immense, untouched by shame or cynicism.

He reminds me that everything depends on the perspective I choose to take. When I look down, I focus on the ugliness of modernity, the plastic Walmart bags that floated downstream from somewhere else, the random Chick-fil-a cup tossed over the railings. He sees the excitement of water regardless of its unattractive surroundings. Or maybe the surroundings aren’t even unattractive to him, just different. What he sees is ever changing and full of newness, all the important things to see, to hear, to enjoy.

I move myself to be at his level, to see what he sees and try to understand what makes this so attractive to him, because he has had an intense love affair with water since the day he was born. If a faucet turns on, he swivels his head to look, reaches out his hand to touch it even if he’s across the room. Even when he was tiny, he had no fear of water whatsoever. It could run over his head, into his eyes, and he would blink as if it were nothing. He would sink down in his tub, his ears underwater and his feet in the air, his eyes looking up at me in complete peace and contentment. LA is not a peaceful baby. He is a curious, on the go, sort of baby. He’s not into waiting or quiet. Except in the water. In those moments where his world settles and he is surrounded by water, I feel peace emanating from him and am reminded of everything that is beautiful and calm in the universe.  

As grateful as I am for the mindfulness courses I have taken, I have learned more from LA about how to remain present than from anyone else. When I am focused on the future, or the past, I let the present slip by and fail to see the good things that are happening right now all around me. The end result of this is a skewed view of life, one in which the darkness of my past can far too easily control my narrative. I lose hope. I lose joy. And when that happens, the trauma wins. When I switch my focus to the present, to what is good and loving, I detach from trauma as my defining feature. It becomes one of many features, not the most prominent and certainly not the most important. 

When I choose to stay present, to focus on the bluebirds in the trees, the way the light dances across the leaves in the trees, I see everything I have to be grateful for, everything that surrounds me and offers me the chance to keep building, keep enjoying, keep making the ugly beautiful. 

Since I was denied a childhood by trauma, being a mommy has given me the gift of recreating a childhood, of discovering what life looks like from a space of innocence and delight. It shows me what life could be like, and it empowers me because it reminds me that I have the capacity to protect that space for someone else, for my beloved child. 

The post Perpetually Present first appeared on Mindful Mommying.