Parenting is hard. As the mother of a 4-year-old, I know this firsthand.
For the last 1,503 days, I’ve learned that you can’t just drop a child into your pre-kid lifestyle and make it work. To my knowledge, there’s no magical fairy dust for this. (Although, if it exists, can someone please send it my way?)
Back to the point: you bend your lifestyle to fit your kids, not the other way around.
Gone are the days where I can meet my friends on a whim or enjoy an afternoon nap on the weekend. Now, that’s not to say I don’t get to have my fair share of “me” time. I even got to spend 10 days in Europe with my husband, sans toddler. (Thanks, mom-mom and pop-pop!)
Which brings me to this: An unnamed mother from across the pond recently authored an essay about her choice to leave her slumbering 11-month-old baby alone in her hotel room while she dined downstairs with her husband. The family of three was visiting friends for the weekend and decided a hotel would be the best place to get together.
“I’m new to motherhood, and it is fair to say that, while pregnant and in the exhausting first few months of my daughter’s life, I missed my freedom and the ease with which I wined, dined and speed-dialed an Uber home without a second thought,” she said.
Girl, I hear you. And I think the majority of moms would agree that sacrificing the freedom to which you were once accustomed is hard.
“It was with some excitement then that on Friday night, my husband and I put our daughter carefully in her deep-sided travel cot, flipped the switch on the video monitor and tiptoed out of our hotel room to dinner,” she said.
Leaving your child alone in your hotel room? Too risky. And, frankly, unthinkable. It wasn’t until the next morning, while at breakfast with friends, that the writer began to rethink her decision.
“There was rapid and wholehearted agreement around the table: we were the only parents prepared to leave our baby sleeping in a hotel room on her own,” she said.
Uh, yeah.
The author, who has chosen to remain nameless for obvious reasons, wonders that through the use of a baby monitor, “Isn’t this is exactly what we do each night in our own houses?”
Not so fast.
When they sat down at their table for dinner, the couple realized that they were too far from the monitor to view the stream. So, every 20 minutes, the couple went up to the room to check on the child. The hotel staff also told the couple they would alert them if any crying was heard in the room.
OK, fine. But what about an emergency situation, such as a fire, where you may not be able to immediately get back to the room?
And, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust strangers, not even the hotel staff who may be listening out for my baby. Because, really, how can you be sure they are doing what they say they will?
“It wasn’t always this way,” she said. “My in-laws have told me tales of weeks away at Butlins, where staff would wander between chalets listening out for crying babies. This is a relic from a more innocent time.”
Which brings the author to this: safety. (P.S. This is important.)
“The second big difference is that at home you can be fairly confident that your house is locked and secure, which you cannot be sure of in a hotel, where bedroom doors can probably be accessed by any number of staff,” she said. “It is for this last reason that some parents of my generation are disproportionately risk averse.”
I’m not sure about you, but I’m not taking any chances on the safety and well-being of my child. Sometimes being a parent isn’t always fun, but you know what? There’s nothing more rewarding than the love of a child. And I can’t imagine the guilt the author might harbor if, on the off chance, something happened to the baby in between those 20-minute checkup shifts while she was downstairs dining with her husband. Ugh.
“But, what are the chances, really, that one of the few people with access to our hotel door key would want and be able to harm our baby?” she said. “I don’t know the exact odds, but they will be incredibly small. Much too small to make me waste an evening sitting in with her in silence, in the dark.”
Next time, I say order room service or hire a sitter.
*The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Care.com.
