THE LONDON WALL

Turns out, if you’re us, it takes about four weeks of international travel with children to hit a wall. To go from that this-is-all-so-romantic-and-exciting mentality to worn out and weary. We arrived in London with colds, which rapidly evolved into something more gnarly. And let me tell you, nothing makes you realize what a physical feat this all is quite like lugging a bulky stroller and sixty five pounds worth of small human by yourself down three flights of stairs to the London Underground with a deep and persistent chest cough.

Sure there are the more obvious things about this trip that are tough - the hauling of children from one place to another, the constant planning and packing and unpacking and planning and packing again. The complete lack of routine or predictability. But it’s also the little inconveniences that start to wear on you. Trying to stretch two pairs of pants two weeks on a toddler who is known to always pee on them just a little each time he uses the potty. Constantly navigating unfamiliar grocery stores with a cranky 5 year old who doesn’t yet have the level of patience required to kindly wait while you try to locate where the eff they keep the peanut butter in France. Lugging those children and groceries home every few days down wobly streets without a car. Making dinner night after night with the crappy frying pan provided by the Airbnb. I think above all though, the thing that is most difficult about this trip is that we’re on our own. Without any of the usual reliefs or distractions. There’s no few hours of alone time while the kids are at school or babysitters or yoga classes or occasional night out to blow off steam with your girlfriends. Brads working most of the time and I’ve got the kids most of the time and we’ve got each other. But when he has to take morning meetings along with 2am calls and I’m trying to juggle two very free spirited (if I’m putting it nicely) kids all day by myself through unfamiliar places, it does make you long a bit for the comfort of home. Then you go and slap a mega virus on top of all that and everything is amplified times ten.

I suppose though if you’re going to get really sick and tired, it’s good to do it in a place where the the urgent care nurses are that British sort of polite and call you love and darling and sweetheart in a better sounding version of your own language.

Despite being a little rundown, we did manage to have a lovely time in England. We stayed about an hour outside of London in the towns of Hove and Caterham and got to dip our toes in the English Channel and ride around on double decker busses and make our way into the city by train on the days we were feeling up to it. The boys loved London. We rode The Eye and got tickets to The Lion King and watched Ketch stare up with wonder at Big Ben. Peter Pan is his all time hero, so seeing where Wendy and Michael and John took flight was a pretty big deal to him.

And while this all sometimes feels exhausting and overwhelming, I still wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because the moments you feel like you want to lock yourself in the bathroom so you can get 10 goddamn minutes without listening to anyone whine pass. And the ones where you find yourself sitting next to your kid at a train station and he looks up at you out of the blue and says “can you even believe we’re lucky enough to be on this trip?” remind you that what you are giving them is worth it, and that we are in fact, the luckiest. The boys have wildly surprised me on the level of stoke they’ve maintained and their ability to travel well. In fact, I think they’re probably holding up better than Brad and I at this point. And while us parents could both use a break every once in a while, I’m so grateful for this uninterrupted time with our family. Childhood seems to be slipping through our fingers these days. West is seeming less and less like a baby with each passing week and I’ve already had to buy Ketch new pants because he grew out of the ones we brought. This time together might sometimes feel like A LOT, but its time together I that I know in the end we’ll hold so dear.

I think another thing that has felt heavy recently is watching current events unfold. I sat up until 2 in the morning with tears steaming down my face as I watched the horrific footage on the night of initial the Hamas attack. I’ve had an especially hard time stomaching that kind of news since I became a mother. And I will say it’s also pretty unsettling knowing you’re far from home when the world’s tensions are high. We left Paris the day before they tear gassed riot crowds at the Eiffel Tower, and I think we had our all time scariest travel moment at a train station in London on the day 100,000 people gathered in the city for a pro Palestine rally.

We were planning to head up to Scotland that morning and had hauled our crew to Kings Crossing downtown in anticipation of our departure. When we entered the train station it was absolute chaos. Storm Babet had hit the eastern side of the UK and it’s high winds and mass flooding had led to canceled trains across the country and swarms of stranded people crowding every inch of the terminal. After a stressful hour of juggling melty kids and trying to figure what the heck we were going to do, we gave up trying to get to Edinburgh, booked another week in London and headed for the tube on our way to our new accommodations. However when we got to the entrance it had been blocked off. Confused crowds of people gathered around the ticket booths. I looked at Brad and Brad looked at me and as we were exchanging “what do you think is going on” glances, a woman standing next to us whispered in a eerily calm voice “there’s been a terrorist attack in The Underground. They’ve locked down the train station.”

The words “terrorist attack” hung in the air pulsing like a heartbeat inside my ears. I looked again at Brad and tried to keep the outside of my body calm as my insides shifted into sheer panic, adrenaline surging through my veins. We stood there for a moment, our eyes both frantically searching the building for an exit and realized sure enough, there wasn’t one. The doors had been closed. We were standing in this huge mass of people locked inside…with our babies.

Immediately we started walking along the perimeter of the building trying to find a way out. After ten minutes that felt like an eternity they opened an entrance at the side of the station. We elbowed our way through the crowd, and bolted out into the rain as quickly as we could, intense claustrophobia lifting from my chest as the feeling of fresh air hit our faces.

After finding a pub that felt a safe enough distance away we popped in and finally hugged each other and kissed the boys and thanked our lucky stars we were all okay. We sat down, ordered a pint and began to search news sources and twitter for what the heck was going on. And while we did find there was a small disturbance where an engineer started shouting Palestine slogans over the loud speaker, it became apparent that the temporary lockdown had more to do with the amount of people that had flooded The Underground and already chaotic station en route to the rally, than any sort of attack. And my god I’ve never been more thankful for misinformation. While I still feel like we’re making the best, most informed decisions that we can about our travel, I think the incident forced upon us a whole new level of awareness. And it has most definitely decreased my appetite for hanging around in big cities during our duration abroad.

There are a lot of things I’m hoping my kids will get from this trip, but if nothing else, I hope it shows them that the world is big. That people look differently than they do and speak differently than they do and live differently than they do, but at the end of the day we are all more similar than different. I love watching them interact with other children at parks and libraries. It’s amazing that even when they can’t speak with each other they still find a common ground. Because isn’t it true, that no matter where you are in the world children love to play.

Watching the events in Gaza continue to break my heart. I know that the issues are deep and complex and untangling the right and wrong and determining the best path forward is more difficult than I can even comprehend, and so I continue to pray for everyone involved. I hope that the violence ends and that peace is found. Because I know the people suffering on both sides are more like us than we know. Their children are our children.

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