Vol. 32 - The Social Life

On being less than honest about how it's going

Sup?! Welcome back, right? It’s been one crazy summer here at Hard as Fuck HQ, with a vacation to Philly, an upcoming work trip to North Dakota, and writing the biggest story I’ve ever been assigned, on top of the whole Being A Parent Every Day thing. But apparently, that wasn’t quite enough to put on our plates, so Emily and I took our babies on a trip to France and Italy over the last two weeks.

If you follow me on The Socials, you may have watched along as we embarked on transcontinental flights, splashed in an Alpine lake, and hung around one of Rome’s most ancient suburbs. We posted photos of smiles, stories of laughs, and enough content to last at least until next summer’s trip, wherever that may be.

Several people responded, whether through DM, email, or text, praising our willingness to undertake such a massive trip with two babies, many wondering how we do it all with smiles.

Only here’s the thing: we didn’t do it all with smiles.

The last two weeks were some of the most emotionally and physically exhausting of my entire life. There were tears. There were meltdowns. There were reprimands. There were fights. There was a stubborn little boy who became more somehow more stubborn the further he was from home (both in distance and time) and a twenty-six-pound baby who demanded to be held nonstop (the audacity).

There were four checked bags and four carry ons that had to be schlepped across five flights and two babies who needed to be occupied over a pair of twenty-plus-hour travel days.

There were two parents who sat on the flight home, bleary eyed, sweaty, and desperate for rest.

Don’t get me wrong; if we had the chance to get right back on a plane to France today and do the exact same thing again, there’s no question we would. The last two weeks were the journey of a lifetime, a trip that allowed us to connect with family and friends in ways that the Covid-19 pandemic has mostly prohibited, and one that has been several years in the making. And they were two weeks with joys I could espouse on for thousands upon thousands of more words. Because there are few things I love more than traveling.

But this isn’t an essay about travel.

It’s about the lives we choose to present on The Socials; those perfectly curated moments of smiling children and well-rested moms and dads, walking hand-in-hand to the lake or spending an evening at the wedding of one of my dearest friends.

We pick the best shot, where everyone is smiling or laughing or touching. We add a little filter, or sometimes not, and we press Post. And those following along see two parents who have their shit together with two worldly babies who are equally as comfortable swimming in a French lake as they are at our local pool; two worldly babies enjoying baguettes and pain au chocolate and learning Italian; two worldly babies playing in piazzas and enjoying dinners at 11pm like real Italiani.

We don’t show the fights, the tears, the toddler almost being run over by an Italian scooter, or the babies waking up screaming in the middle of the night because their parents decided taking them six clock-hours ahead for two weeks to countries that don’t really do air conditioning was a good idea.

Those stories we keep to ourselves.

About five days into our trip, there was one story I posted to my Instagram that reflected what so much of our last two weeks were like.

We set out that morning with a plan to ride the entire twenty-three mile greenway route around the lake. A challenge, no doubt, but something we planned to spend the morning doing.

Some miles in, our son took a pretty nasty spill on the bike we rented for him. He crossed Emily’s wheel, clipping it, which sent him flying off the greenway and into an adjacent ditch. His finger was bleeding and he was rather shaken up. After holding him for five or so minutes, he calmed down enough for me to placed him in the bike trailer that Emily was using to tow our daughter. The commotion was enough to wake her up. She started crying. He started crying. They both started screaming. Emily and I, recognizing the complete absurdity of it all, started laughing. Because what the fuck are we even doing out here?!

So, as my wife struggled to calm our two screaming babies, I did what any good husband would do and took a video of the moment. Of course, I was laughing, and I asked the camera if we had bitten off more than we could chew.

It was a microcosm of the whole of our vacation; stunning, world-class surroundings, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, crying babies, and two parents looking at each other with bewilderment, wondering what the fuck we were thinking in the first place.

The last two weeks were a perfect blend of that one Instagram story, living the highest highs and the lowest lows. We made memories that will last forever and proved to ourselves that, yes, we can do something quite this big. We gave our children an amazing trip full of world-class food and time spent with dear friends and family. But we also encountered more than our fair share of emotional meltdowns, of defiant behavior, and knock-down, drag-out fights.

So before you slide into my DMs, asking me how Emily and I do it, remember that, yes, we did it. But sometimes, often, in fact, just barely.

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