First Time across the Ocean with a baby

I have run through airports and flown on planes many dozens of times in my life. I started when I was 16 - before the world was afraid - before hypersecurity - and I created it in my mind to the most romantic place. It is a place - even though it is thousands of places (planes, airports, cities, countries). In this place, there are no natives and there are no foreigners - none of us belong, all of us are passing through. And I am not what anyone sees me as or knows me to be - I am stripped of all cultural and social context and therefore feel completely free to be completely me.

I made rituals for myself in this place: I always sample things in Duty Free; I always take my time in the bathrooms; I always take a journal.

A few years ago, a great thing happened to me - I found someone to be mine and he goes to this place with me. His passport is a different color but he likes most of the same things. I compromised some of my rituals but I added new ones: we sit together and speak to each other in a mix of languages (german, estonian, spanish, english, bit of arabic) that we both understand and figure no one else around us can. We get through long transoceanic flights watching movies and snuggling, sleeping on each other in uncomfortable positions.

And for the first time, we are three. I got dropped off to my special place, now with a husband and a baby. In general, I would say my place is not a good place for a 4 month old - the scale and scope of it is too big and busy; there is too much unexplained noise all around all the time; no good places to sleep; no good places to eat; external schedules dictating rather than the schedules of his body. But here are some things I learned:

1. Even tiny sounds are painfully audible in an airplane. Though my baby cries very little, he does make noises over a 9 hour period and those noises are heard by about a 20 person radius, depending on the plane. His noises made his parents stressed because we want to be polite to others. I noticed that as I walked my sweet (quiet) baby down the aisles, there were some kind smiles directed at me, all of them from older people - and I wondered if they were remembering their own experiences.

2. We nursed on the way up and on the way down (to help his ears) - calculating and manipulating sleeping and eating schedules, etc. I begin to wonder if all that was necessary...

3. Parents of an infant don't sleep. At all. We were awake 30 hours straight.

4. My son is a charmer. I watched, fascinated as my tiny baby looked at the people on the plane. He would glance at the crowd and then one face seemed good to him and he looked at that person with obvious intent of being looked at in return. If he got what he wanted, he lit up with a smile, which, of course, meant one was returned back to him. When he got that smile, he was very happy and moved on to the next person. He liked some more than others and they were always women.

This is the one thing I didn't read about plane riding with infants - whatever bothersome noises are erased by their charms. Hayden loved the end, where people had to walk close by him as they unboarded - he made at least 8 people smile back at him. The whole back of the plane was filled with a warm energy as people who hadn't wanted to smile were forced to, and the ice of awkwardness at being in such tight proximity to others yet trying to retain isolation was broken - a dozen people could no longer help but be aware that they had all just been made happy by the same thing - the tiny baby in my arms. Peep and I just watched, stunned and shy. We have discussed that we wish for our child that he be a people-person but felt concerned that we wouldn't be able to teach him. If anything, this experience taught us that Hayden is already a social genius and all we have to do is not mess him up.

Now we are all three in the little garden house Peep grew up in - finally his mother has met her newest grandson. We are where we set out to go and being here is worth the journey.