I had done my homework. I was prepared. Still, as I boarded the plane with my 6-week-old cradled in my arms — her very first flight, ever — panic flooded in.
What if she cries nonstop?
What if her ears hurt, and I can’t soothe her?
What if I do everything wrong, and everyone on board knows it?
Friends with older children had dismissed my newbie fears, conveniently forgetting they had once shared them: “Walk her up and down the aisle when she’s fussy. She’ll be fine.”
I knew better. My daughter may have been tiny, but she was a force to be reckoned with, especially when any source of discomfort kicked in. I was braced for the ear pain I’d read so much about.
My husband and I made our way to our seats, smack in the middle of the airplane, where I calculated her cries would fill the entire cabin with impressive efficiency. My daughter squirmed in my arms.
“Her first of many flights,” my husband said proudly.
She was, after all, born into a travel-obsessed family. I was around her age when I took my first flight, and my husband was, too. Travel had shaped our lives, first with our own families, then together as one. We hoped to pass that same wanderlust on to our first child — provided I didn’t completely unravel at 39,000 feet.
My daughter looked impossibly small in the oversized car seat, perched on the even larger airplane seat. My husband cooed to her as he buckled her in, while I locked my jaw and waited.
She hated the car seat. She loved to be held. This was never going to work.
But that tiny vein that usually rose on her forehead when she was upset did not appear. Neither did the scrunched-up nose or the sharp cry that always undid me. Instead, my typically restless child did the one thing I had not planned for: She fell asleep.
And she stayed asleep. Through the pilot’s announcement. Through takeoff. Through turbulence. Through the shifts in altitude. Even through the landing. We had experienced the entire choreography of the flight without a single sound from her.
“Oh, my, what a wonderful little traveler,” a flight attendant said midway through the trip. “You wouldn’t even know she was here.”
I smiled back, careful not to jinx it. After all my research, all my anxiety and every imagined worst-case scenario,
my daughter had taught me something very important: Sometimes the journey unfolds far more gently than you expect. All I had to do was stop trying to plan every moment of it — my first real lesson in traveling as a mother.
Happy reading!
Alona Abbady Martinez
alona@bocaratonobserver.com