“Paris? I’d love to!” were my exact words. Then, I remembered that we have a four month old. Right. Maybe I should think this through a little more.
When my husband came home over lunch a couple of days before my thirtieth birthday, I knew he had a surprise planned. There was a glint in his eye when he asked if I would like to go away for my birthday. Brad said he wanted to surprise me, but figured that I needed to plan a little more since we now have a baby and we would be taking her along. Note: this was two days before we were to leave for Paris, so the word “planning” is used loosely here. I immediately said “yes!” and gave him a big hug. He ushered me to the computer and showed me the Web site of the cute hotel where we would be staying and explained that it would be an easy five-hour drive from our home in Switzerland.
Perfect! Well, not ideal, but I could make this work, right? I am resourceful and flexible and, come on; this is Paris we are talking about. But, the more I thought about it, the more stressed out I became. Our daughter was just getting over a cold and we were scheduled to fly to the U.S. the following week. I was worried that running around Paris was not the best thing for any of us. What would we even do in Paris with an infant in tow? Could we go to the galleries and museums that we love? Dine at quaint out-of-the-way venues? I imagined squeezing our stroller between tables, bumping into chairs, and generally ticking off the French with our “enormous American stroller.”
After several emails to my “mom friends” and a lot of worrying, I decided that it was just not a good idea. It was classic—the collision of my old life and my new life—and it really threw me. In my old life, Brad and I took spontaneous vacations and long weekends, jumping on trains all over Europe and rarely having a hotel reservation waiting at the other end. We lived abroad for two years and traveled like fools, maintaining a break-neck pace when we were visiting a new locale. It was amazing. We made some of our best memories on these random adventures around Europe.
But, I remind myself, this is my new life and I’m now responsible for the well being of a child. I am a mother now (gulp!). We are now living abroad again and, this time, we have a large dog and a small baby. So, while we know that our adventures are not over, they are modified and require more planning and scaling down of our expectations and schedule. Trips to Paris are still on the agenda; they just need to be tweaked to fit the rhythm and temperament of an infant.
In the end, we decided to do a day trip to the French Alps, which is only one hour away, way less stressful, and just as beautiful. Brad was very understanding about the situation, but it put things in perspective for him as well. He knows that this European experience is not going to be the same, but there is a part of him (and me, for that matter) that still longs for the type of freedom we once had. I found it romantic that he thought of taking me to Paris to celebrate a new decade—I left the hotel’s Web site bookmarked just in case. And, I welcomed the nostalgic glow that the suggestion brought, along with the glimmer of hope that there is still a part of our old lives peppered throughout our new one. As one of my good friends, with thousands of frequent flyer miles racked up said, “motherhood is what it is—you can’t worry about it.” We have had the adventures, and we’ll have them again, but now is a different era.
