On Roadtripping (or, To Whom Much Is Given)

So last week we took our first road trip with little Sonechka. Saw my folks, caught up with dear friends, went to a wedding. Had the best margaritas in the Western Hemisphere and did some almost halfway decent karaoke. Good times. But, also—yeesh—rough times.

She's four months old now, not counting time served in utero, and can often sleep through the night with only a few wake-ups for feeding and cooing; and so, we mostly drove at night. But on the way home, we got up early and tried to drive through the day in hopes of sleeping in our own bed before returning to work the next morning. Our beloved treasure did not assent to this undertaking.

A good marriage, of course, requires complementarity. My Ellabelle is a highly organized and motivated person, thank God, and part of her job is to poke me when I get scattered or lazy; and part of my job in turn is to soothe her when she gets a skosh or a soupçon too motivated. But a tolerable marriage also wants similarity, and she and I definitely share a rather sensitive temperament. So after listening to Sonya cry for approximately infinity, we were all three of us crying; and we ultimately got a hotel room two hours from home and drove the last stretch at 4 in the morning with Ellie in the back seat consoling our girl and me almost weaving across lanes for fatigue. In short, traveling was quite a bit easier before we became parents.

We love our cat. (Shut up, Dan.) It was awfully nice to come home and find him waiting for us. But it was also nice to stick a cat-door in the window, throw some food in a bowl, and leave him alone for ten days. It turns out you can't do that with an infant.

What manner of infant are you?

The soul-shaking, cosmos-changing gift of offspring comes with a hefty price tag. Which—technically, that's not exactly a gift, is it. I guess it's more like a sacred trust. Which—honestly, not any less intimidating.

Road trips are kind of a parental rite of passage because there's no buffer, no refuge, no veil: it's just you and the kid(s) stuffed together in a tiny space for as many hours at a time as it takes to burn a tank of gas. Then you stretch your legs, buy some Dr. Pepper, and cram right back into the car. Hopefully you all like each other!

Luckily, we like Sonya rather a lot. Much will be expected of us in the way of sacrifice and shared pain; but if she had come with a receipt and a refund policy, we wouldn't have kept them. When she's having an easy day, she's the sweetest thing I've ever seen, and it makes me love her all the more. When she's hard and frustrating, it makes me practice loving all the more. Everything she does deepens our capacity for love and keeps on filling us to capacity.

Mind you, all that being said—next trip, I think we're gonna fly.