Traveling with children can be difficult, to put it mildly. Traveling with multiple children is of course more difficult. Traveling with multiple children, all under the age of 3, while pregnant, is nearly impossible. I recently watched a husband and wife team try to do just this, and it was kind of a heartbreaking experience. My mother worked for Family Planning during the 70s, and I grew up to work first as a dancer and then as a trainer, with my primary clientele being women between the ages of 30 and 70 who had given birth to one or more children. Pregnancy has always been around me, and when I began contemplating starting my own family, one of the first things my mother said was “give yourself time between births or your body will fall apart”. As I have witnessed the different ways that my peers and I have gone about growing our families, I have to say that my mother’s advice was incredibly important.
The young couple I saw on the plane had what appeared to be a two-year old who could walk and play alone just fine. They also had a set of twin girls who were bottle-fed, and the biggest bag of children’s clothing I have ever seen. Their mother was also noticeably pregnant again. As we began to taxi down the runway, the mother, who was holding one half of the twin-set, began to vomit repeatedly. I was sitting in the row in front of her, so when I heard her start to be sick, I stood up and asked if she needed help. She indicated that I should take her baby, since her husband, who was sitting in the aisle across from her, had his hands full with the other twin and the two year-old. The flight attendants came running to fuss at me about not being in my seatbelt, and then realized the situation. The upshot was that, in order to take off in a timely manner, I ended up having a very unhappy baby strapped to my chest during take-off. I gave the little person back to mom a bit later. The entire family fell into an exhausted sleep less than an hour into the flight. (Neither mom or dad thanked me for my help.)
While the need to have a big family immediately burns bright in some couples, there has to be an understanding that a woman’s body can only take so much and pregnancy is no cruise. The hormones, energy, and physical changes required to grow a life and then bring it into the world are huge. While teen pregnancy rates would make it appear as if becoming pregnant is easy, the actual process of bringing a healthy child into the world is incredibly difficult. If it were an easy thing to do, there would be less need for hormone therapy and fewer miscarriages. Anyone who has had children knows that the changes that occur in your body are profound. If you are thinking about creating a large family quickly then please, please, allow yourself the space to heal completely between babies.
Giving birth to children in such a way that they can function as each other’s playmates and friends is great. However, creating a playmate for your child, at the risk of destroying your own body, seems oxymoronic. My clients’ who gave birth to multiple children, one on top of the other, are far more likely to suffer from back problems, have issues with water retention, weight gain, and exhibit significantly weaker abdominal and core muscle strength, than my clients who gave themselves the time to recuperate completely between babies. Please understand, everyone is different, so take this article with a grain of salt. My advice and my mother’s before me is simply based upon personal observation and experience. Create the kind of family you want, when you want, but always remember that your health matters, too.
Written by Dee Mason
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