Chapter 10: Home is Where

We used to fly like the Wall-E people, cruising through space, encased in athleisure and big headphones, on-demand entertainment dancing across our screens while we cheers our complimentary coach beverages.

This flight feels more like one of the Wright Brothers’ first attempts, makeshift wings strapped to a bi-cycle machine, two of us pedaling madly to keep it afloat.

We withhold the bottle until take-off, ensuring she’ll drink as we ascend, mitigating the pressure on her eardrums. Eleanor inflates a lap mattress with a hand pump. I struggle to grab items from the baby-bag I’ve packed too tight. We pass her back and forth like a cute hot potato. When she falls asleep, we scramble to play a movie on our seat-screens, eager to recapture some of that pre-baby bliss, and when she wakes shortly thereafter, she gets tangled in our headphone cords.

We’re flying to Hawaii. My brother-in-law’s in-laws have a condo there— he and his wife will be meeting us for a little family getaway. Moreover, we’re determined to be those people: “HAVE BABY WILL TRAVEL.”

(Though I suspect I’m determined to be those people and my wife just supports me.)

Either way, it’s a free crib in Hawaii, with family, it’s a no-brainer!

We land on the Big Island and collect our luggage. I love traveling light, but those days are behind us. Everything’s packed to the brim with milk, bibs, and equipment. When I stack a duffel atop a suitcase and wheel it through the terminal, it feels like I’m steering a cruise ship. I signal before I turn.

It’s such a relief to be on the ground, but there’s more work ahead, and every little task feels massive because we’re on hour eight of travel and everyone’s beginning to expire: We wrangle our caravan to the pick-up area—only to find it’s a decoy. We haul everything to the real pick-up spot, wrestle the stroller into car seat mode, buckle her in, and begin the hour-long ride to our destination, where she makes it clear, SHE’S HAD ENOUGH. We search for the condo in the dark, drag suitcases over cobblestones, fumble for the door code, mistake it for the gate code, text, call, clarify—finally gain entry, only to find it’s been shut tight for months, effectively transforming it into a greenhouse. The thermostat reads 88 degrees, we stumble around in the dark while feeling for light switches and sweating through our athleisure, and boy do I wish we hadn’t beat Uncle Aaron and Aunt Alyssa to the spot.

One of us sets up the travel crib, baby monitor, and white noise machine, while the other mixes and heats up a bottle of formula. I miss our Baby Brezza, the one-touch bottle-maker. I miss the ease of all our stuff.

We put her to sleep and lie in my in-law’s in-laws’ master bed within whispering distance of the baby, hungry and sticky and ready for vacation to begin any second… and then she begins to wail.

This isn’t her crib, this isn’t her nursery, this isn’t even her timezone.

We take turns soothing her well into the night. As I hunch over her paper thin travel mattress, just inches off the floor, I think about every single dollar we’ve spent to put ourselves right here, right now, routines demolished and so far from home.

Four weeks earlier, we took our first flight with Ava. (Her name is Ava, by the way.)

We’re en route to New York City for my dad’s memorial and her (also baby) cousin’s baptism— first flight, first funeral, first cousin intro, first homecoming back to my hometown. In the week leading up, Eleanor feels the anxiety of all the firsts so acutely, she develops a rash on her face that blows her lips up to three times their normal size.

There in seat 29F, with my wife and my baby and our inflatable mattress, I can’t help but picture the alternate reality where I live closer to home. There, she’s one car-nap away from being at grandma and grandpa’s. There, my dad gets to meet her before he passes. There, visits with family feel simple, not seismic, and nobody breaks out into hives. There, there…

Before Ava came along, I wanted my world to stay big. Now, all I want is to be born live and die in the same place; multiple generations within reach, friends, family, and village elders coming to pay respects to our newborn like Baby Jesus while a beatific lamb looks on.

The plane lands at JFK. Our girl did so, so well. She receives her “first flight” wings from the attendants as we pose for a photo in the aisle, beaming with pride and relief.

We set her crib up in the living room of my childhood apartment where she takes the City that Never Sleeps to heart. Zzz’s come in fits and starts and at one point, I wake her up after I accidentally activate the printer which sits one foot from her head.

At the baptism, when she meets her cousin, they reach hands out to one another and it looks exactly like Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” At the memorial, she cries during my eulogy, a pure coincidence absolutely, but it won’t stop me from sharing the story.

Afterwards, we lounge in Central Park all together, family and extended family, and it’s instantly one of my favorite moments in her little life. We stroll her down Broadway, way past her bedtime as she looks up, her wide eyes dazzled by the city lights flickering above and I wonder if this is where she’s meant to be.

Back on the Big Island, we get a bad night’s sleep then, as always, everything’s lighter in the morning. Eleanor and I snorkel while our daughter lies on the beach with her aunt and uncle, sunbathing, shadebathing, and getting to know one another. Then, that evening crystallizes into one of those perfect vacation scenes — the sun setting over the ocean, live music in the distance, everyone sporting their best vacation shirt, the one they packed at the top of their suitcase, everyone fed and showered and fully arrived.

Six weeks later, we’re at it again, on our way to Cape Cod to celebrate Grandpa Ormond’s 80th birthday. With two long distance round trips under our belts, we’ve begun to hone our Airbaby Travel Selves.

We take the aisle seat instead of bunkering down by the window. We leave the lap mattress and its requisite hand pump at home, donning the baby carrier instead. We attach toys to tethers and affix them to shoulder straps, a trick we lift from observing more experienced parents navigate the air. We streamline our bottle game, our bib game, our baby butt game. We remember to feed ourselves, not just her. We plug a bluetooth transmitter into the seat-screens so that our child doesn’t become tangled in our wires. We watch a heavy foreign feature called Io Capitano about migrants leaving home and risking everything in pursuit of something better. We fist-bump with each passing hour and say things like, “four down, two to go.”

In the Cape, we’re treated to a big beautiful house with a pool and a view of the bay. Everybody’s here, grandparents aunts uncles lobster rolls and baby cousin. I do vacation things like ride a bike by the beach and sit on the porch reading a book. I do guy with a baby things like stroll Ava around our cul-de-sac no fewer than five hundred times.

At night, our loss of home-field advantage is again all too apparent. The big beautiful house doesn’t distribute air evenly, so our upstairs bedroom becomes the North Pole while baby cousin’s basement bedroom descends into something hotter than hell, which is especially unfair given that she’s the only baby who’s been baptized. Two family members who love each other dearly get into a shouting match over the thermostat. Only those without babies sleep well. On one of those sleepless nights, I take a comforter out to a deck chair and watch a meteor shower.

Two months later, we’re driving to Zion National Park to meet my mom, brother, and sister for an extended weekend. We stop at 200-mile intervals to charge our car battery, change her diaper, and toss her into the air against the backdrop of the Wal-Marts of the Great Southwest. She tolerates an audiobook for a couple of hours, then starts screaming. She falls asleep to soothing classical for a bit, then wakes up and starts screaming. It’s not a problem in the least, everything feels more manageable on the ground.

We arrive, and I unleash our now-crawling baby on my family while Eleanor scampers around our new digs, babyproofing everything she can.

They haven’t seen this baby in four months - nearly half her lifetime - so I begin updating them on all her new tricks quirks and features and quickly feel overwhelmed. I don’t want to have to fill them in. I want to bottle all 41 weeks of her, shake them up, pour them into a row of shot glasses, throw ‘em down, and bring us all present, all knowing her, all whole.

I struggle with this. Here I am in the shadow of Zion, one of the most beautiful places on earth, with the people closest to me and all I can think is that I want something else. I want the mundane. I want them to know her on a Tuesday before joining her at a full sprint on an epic trip.

And then come more of the perfect moments. We’re at a lookout but I’m looking at my sister as she marvels at her niece. She sits in bed with my brother and watches him watch Tottenham soccer, following his cues. Eleanor and Ava and I run into my mom while we’re hiking up towards Angel’s Landing and she’s on her way down. It reminds me of the once upon a delightful time when the three of us ran into each other in a bike lane in New York City, each of us coming from our respective jobs, each of us on our way home. Back in Zion, we’re all riding our bikes through the canyon, Ava in a trailer behind me yelling her garbled version of weeeeeee!

On the drive back, a traffic detour turns a seven-hour drive into a tenner and when we finally roll back into our garage we celebrate like we’ve just won the lottery, shouting, Ava, we’re home!

In November, we fly to DC for Thanksgiving where we’ll stay for ten whole days. It’s Ava’s other homecoming, and her fourth flight. With the wind at our backs, we’re just four hours in when we begin our descent so I announce to Eleanor, like the local idiot, this has been our smoothest trip yet. Then the plane pulls up.

DC hasn’t seen rain in two months and tonight, it’s making up for lost time with a full blown storm. We land in Philly instead where we sit on the tarmac, waiting to refuel, then for take-off clearance, then for that very same storm to pass overhead. With no end in sight, we stop fistbumping every hour. We are inside this airplane indefinitely.

Had we turned the plane around and headed back to California, we would have almost been back home by now. But our girl is an absolute champion, making friends with every one of our plane-neighbors, poking her head up to catch people’s attention and squeaking “hey!” especially at the one guy who refuses to make eye contact with her. Get him, girl! Melt his icy heart!

The family across the aisle tell us that although this flight has been a nightmare, our girl made their night, which in turn makes mine.

Finally, we line up to take back off and just then, she puts together a sizeable diaper. We ask the attendant if we can take her to the bathroom - she says we can, but we’ll risk losing our spot on the tarmac and we both say HECK NO, please for the love of god get this plane back in the air.

We wait until we’re back up, then I change her in a dark, turbulent bathroom while she wails uneasily and again I sweat through my athleisure.

We arrive to DC after twelve hours of travel. There, in my wife’s childhood home, Nana’s made up a lovely room for Ava and only Ava, complete with fleece pajamas laid out across flannel sheets. Like a local genius, Eleanor’s upgraded her travel mattress and the sum of all these parts is that she sleeps well, and we sleep well.

Over this week and a half, she meets some of our best and oldest friends. She sees so much family, and nobody needs to be re-introduced. It’s all much easier this time around, and by the end, we’re ready to return.

When we roll back into our garage in Los Angeles, open the car door and lift her out, we both yell, Ava, we’re home! And again we’ve won the lottery.

I don’t know if I’m yelling it for me, I know for certain that I’m yelling it for her.

Should I have a kid? Idk, let’s find out!