Turns Out, The Baby Is Just Fine Without Me
The freedom and confusion of leaving the kid with my husband for the weekend
On Friday, I woke up at 6 am and caught the first plane I’ve boarded in more than three years. I made some amateur mistakes.
I tried to check in at the wrong counter, because all of the anodyne vaguely patriotic airline names kind of blend together, with the exception of FRONTIER, which connotes risk, and SPIRIT, which sounds haunted. I thought I was flying United. I was flying American. Or maybe it was the other way around.
My known traveler number has expired and I never got it renewed, because if there’s anything I hate more than flying, it’s appointments.
I didn’t put my liquids in a ziplock bag because it didn’t occur to me as I was throwing various items of clothing into a small suitcase at 6 am that we might still be doing that. We started doing that after a bunch of terrorists were busted before they were able to execute their plan to blow up airplanes using liquids smuggled onto planes via soft drink bottles all the way back in 2006. I remember the year because it was right before I was supposed to fly to Ft. Lauderdale to visit my college boyfriend and his family. I believe that during that trip, his family rented Team America: World Police and so, within hours of meeting them, I was watching simulated marionette puppet sex in the den with his mom and dad. Later that evening, his younger sister would make me cry. I haven’t talked to the boyfriend in over a decade. She and I are still friends.
Point is: the ziplock bag thing started a long, long time ago. There are American teenagers who never lived in a world where we didn’t have to dump their toiletries into smaller containers or listen to their grandma complain about having her tub of cold cream confiscated at the security checkpoint for the whole family vacation. Has a poorly designed conspiracy touched more lives than the aspiring soda bottle bombers? Can’t believe we’re still doing it. Can’t believe I had faith that air travel might ever change for the better, in the tiniest of ways.
In addition to all of the actual forgetting of this trip, I also battled the nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong. That’s because this weekend marks the first time since my daughter was born that I’ve been without her for a full 24 hours.
Feels weird!
I wasn’t prepared for how strange it would feel, because, as with many aspects of parenting, there’s no way to fully convey how it feels to a person who hasn’t been through it yet. It’s not worry— she’s with my husband, who is a perfectly competent caretaker. Anything that would happen on his watch would be just as likely to happen under mine.
I am oscillating between feeling free and feeling lonely. I took a Hot Girl Walk through the Dallas airport without a stroller and a dog. I ate dinner by myself without anybody throwing an entire plate of spaghetti on the ground next to me. I watched a episode of 90 Day Fiance before bed without the pricking fear that I could be interrupted any second by the sound of Juniper yelling directly at the doorknob of her room. I wandered around on State Street without having a particular place to go or a particular time I needed to be back.
I almost cried when my husband and baby couldn’t FaceTime when I wanted to. I woke up several times throughout the night confused about where I was, once in the middle of a dream that I’d locked my daughter in the hotel safe and couldn’t get her out. I’ve told everybody who will listen that this is my first time away from my baby.
After over a year of feeling like a baby’s full-time assistant, I feel like I have actual time off, even though I’ve spent my time “off” doing the work that actually pays me in money. But out in the world without her, I feel a little bit like a Jello-mold that didn’t set properly, like I’m wearing old clothes that aren’t in fashion anymore. I am a pair of Y2K era whisker-wash glitter jeans with a flared leg strolling through Madison, Wisconsin.
Josh and Juniper seem to be doing great on their weekend without me. She babbles happily on FaceTime, she slept well, she’s been eating well. I don’t know if she even realizes that I’m gone-gone, and won’t be back until late tomorrow night. Chalk that one up to her being a little young to understand time. And Josh is an involved dad (which should be the default for every couple, but isn’t) who doesn’t do the Weaponized Incompetence Husband thing and pretend he doesn’t know basic things like what food she eats and where her diapers are. If anything, there’s a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this weekend will prove that I’m not actually as necessary as I used to be. And if that’s the case, then was all of the work I did to be as present as I possibly could to her also unnecessary? Could I have done less? Should I do less in the future?
Maybe I’ll ponder these questions while I lie down, uninterrupted, for half an hour.
This is so very reminiscent of my first work trip away. And in the last 9 months or so I’ve been the one doing more work travel so the script is flipped from the way it was before. I don’t think it’s about “doing more” or “less.” I just think that we tend to think of time spent with the baby more in terms of quantity rather than quality. Also spending so much time with one’s baby can make any time away feel like ages when you’re not used to it. Last summer I had a conference in Paris and then I got COVID so I was away for 10 full days which felt like so much. But once it was over it wasn’t like there was this huge gash of missing time that we were both mourning. We were just happy to be living our lives normally again.