A couple of months ago we decided to embrace shared parental leave and go away for three weeks. The trip was a joint decision - if by “joint” you mean one of us made an aggressively loud and robust case for it in front of friends, family and passing acquaintances until the other person not so much agreed, but succumbed to the inevitable path their life was about to take - and flights were duly booked.
Part of the initial reluctance on my boyfriend’s side was:
a) the cost, given our lack of salary,
b) his height, which is 6 ft 1, and
c) the flight length, which was fourteen hours.
This, and the idea of being contained in economy seats for that time with an increasingly uncontainable 10 month old, who would probably count making largely incoherent noises among his hobbies if he could talk, which he can’t, hence all the squawking.
Fourteen hours is generally just enough time to find out whether you’ve made a good or bad decision about most things in life: like driving down to Cornwall on a bank holiday weekend, or trying a new £27 mascara, or spending upwards of £1,000pp on being strapped into a chair in the sky with a baby who has recently mastered the art of thumping around at speed on his hands and knees. Better yet, mention your intention to take your newly-crawling child on a long haul flight and most people will also have thoughts, which they’ll express by saying wow how exciting! with their words and lol, good luck with their face. And by most people I mean:
a) other parents who took their multiple children abroad once, to France, eight years ago,
b) teachers,
and c) people who don’t have kids at all.
And back when I was firmly on the fence about the whole ‘should I have a kid’ thing, I’d have probably been making faces too. But now I’m off the fence and in the garden with the beautiful sky and the lovely flowers and occasional projectile bedtime voms, and I know that if it’s between spending a miserable fourteen hours sitting in the house, or a miserable fourteen hours on a plane, I’d still choose the one where we all end up in Japan at the end of it.
And so in April, two parents and their baby flew to Tokyo: a city that scores highly on my list of Places I’ve Gone Out For Dinner By Myself And Ended Up Having An All-Nighter With Complete Strangers, but now features prominently on my new and burgeoning list of Places In The World That We’ve Taken The Baby And Actually Had A Really Nice Series of Nights In.
The trip was, all things considered, a bit of a risk: not the plane ride, which I personally wasn’t that phased about given I’m 5 ft 3 and own a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, but going to a country I’d been to before, by myself, and had a really good time. I worried that the trip would be completely derailed by the memory of an unencumbered-past-me sauntering around Kyoto, being extremely zen ‘n’ that in Buddhist temples, and mainlining whiskey highballs in tiny little bars.
And it was different this time around, how could it not be - and wasn’t that the point? The decision to have a kid was quite literally an active choice to veer some aspects of my life away from what it was. Not just in London, not just in the flat, not just after work, but on a plane, and in restaurants, and wherever we go in the world.
But what I didn’t really expect was that I’d end up in many ways preferring this new, encumbered version of life and the way it opened up a completely different side of Japan. The side where I discover my boyfriend’s previously underrated skill for using Google Maps to take us five streets away from any main drag and into a restaurant with the vibe of someone’s house, where they serve us a beautiful, reasonably priced, four course meal of some of the tastiest, delicately made food I’ve ever had; all in the time it takes for the baby to have a nap. The late afternoons playing on department store rooftops, the train journeys where people smiled at us and the Little Lad and said ‘kawaii!’ and ‘how old is he?’, which we’d somehow understand even though we don’t speak Japanese. And the evenings in: Dragon’s Den on the iPad in darkened hotel rooms; the nights out: two post-sento walks with a good friend - hair wet, skin clean and flushed and tight from a hot soak - a beer from 7Eleven in our hands, walking around Ogikubo in the dark catching up on life decisions until the cans were empty, then back to our small, compact apartments, where our partners and kids were asleep.
***
Before you do most things, other people’s experiences are pretty much all you’ve got to go on. And somehow, even with a really good pair of headphones, their experiences absorb into your worldview and shape your idea of what’s possible, what’s difficult, what’s easy, what’s not, whatever the thing you’ve chosen to do is going to be.
We had fourteen hours on that plane to decide that actually, a long haul flight with a kid was doable, it was alright. I had three weeks in Japan to decide that if we ever go on a trip for that long again, next time we’ll actually pack light. And ah, next time: I can already hear the voices saying well that was then, and next time it’ll be harder, it’ll be more difficult, just wait until he’s walking, you won’t be in those restaurants when he’s not napping, he won’t sit still!
And yeah, maybe, but spoiler: we’ll probably give it a go anyway - and if we do, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Three things you might like:
“The idea that places should be numbered, that the built environment should be legible in this way, is so universal these days that it passes unnoticed, and likely doesn’t strike you as something that someone had to invent. But they did.” Read.
“I don't think, oh, I've gotta write something that's gonna mean something in 30 years’ time. It's not like that. It's never that deliberate. It’s a really wonderful thing about having songs become part of people's life story […] I can't fully explain it. I'm really grateful. It's also a great mystery.” Listen.
If I had a day off work next week, I’d pick a nice quiet time of day and go and see one of my favourite yearly exhibitions (it’s the last week).
PS. Did you see that? I almost just wrote a newsletter about Japan without mentioning all the toilets. Seriously. You lot don’t know about living until you’ve experienced walking around a city where you’re never more than 3 minutes from a clean, self-flushing, sometimes heated, accessible loo. x
Dear Jo, Always good to hear yr humorous thoughts! I can only read in awe at the thought of taking a baby anywhere! I never managed it but I am very elderly and things have changed a lot. My first flight was aged 32 and our daughter was 12. Keep writing! Gloria