Asking after 3 hours on a tarmac, a cancelled flight, and another two hours waiting on luggage – with a 4 month old and a wife who progressively just complained more and more.
I hope to be calm and stoic and just navigate towards solutions, but at some point it all becomes too much and I lose my own cool.
Any advice/experience?
Comments
Focus on the solution at hand, tell your wife what you need her to do, and take each problem one at a time
The sun will rise again tomorrow and it’s a fresh day. The reality is that your stress today has derived from an issue that is out of your control. No way to reduce it but to go through it. Be the calm in the storm.
Marry someone who is easygoing and levelheaded, slow to complain and able to keep calm when things don’t go to plan. Then make sure you’re behaving the same way. That’ll help keep your baby placid too.
We waited 6.5 hours for a plane to leave once when the boys were small. There’s nothing to do. Walk around with the 4 month old until they fall asleep. Read a book, play a game, watch a movie or doom scroll on your phone.
No plan survives contact within the enemy. That’s just how things are. Panicing doesn’t really help you. You are better off just taking it slow and calm.
Expect the chaos. As a man, nothing is more infuriating than traveling with family because traveling your whole life before that consisted of “I think I’ll go __” and then just going.
I tend not to stress about things I have no control over. Why wind myself up?
Just take a deep breath, exhale through your nose and zen it out.
In situations like this, I take a time-out and get a beer.
Then I return to the scene and check what had happened in the meantime.
Traveling
can beis stressful. Having traveled around the world during my consulting days for over a decade has pretty much thrown everything that can go wrong at me. So I expect things to go wrong, which is why I do the minimum amount of planning. My wife loves to plan, and tends to get more upset when the plans go up in flames. While I have always been rather calm and stoic, everybody has a boiling point and different triggers that get them worked up.So there are two things you need to do in my eyes:
Remind yourself that it is not helpful to get all worked up over things you have no influence over. Yes, you can be upset and vent for a while, but then you need to calm down and assess the situation. Arguing about it or telling others to not get worked up over it does not work. You need to find something that helps them, and they probably don’t even realize what that is because they’re too busy being upset.
For me, it is all about comfort levels. I can wait, but I want to wait comfortably at least (ideally with a nice seat, a beer and charging my stuff). For my wife, and this is very common, most of the time when she gets real upset, she just needs a decent meal (vending machine peanuts won’t cut it) and some cuddles. For kids it tends to be boredom and tiredness that gets to them. Kids are hardest to deal with. In the best case, they are so tired that they will need to sleep. In the worst case, it’s constant tantrum.
So my strategy when things go south is to first try and get clarity as to when and how things will continue, and if necessary make the changes required. Once that is done — or when it cannot be done — I will address the needs of my wife. You need to put her first because once she’s okay, she will keep shit off your back.
At airports, the easiest way of reducing stress is to go to a lounge or “upper class” restaurant. If possible, go to a lounge. Yes, it costs money (some of the “better” credit cards come with memberships and reduced rates — think whether that is worth it to you). But those comfortable seats, the quiet, the buffet and drinks make it feel like an oasis in the chaos. If you have kids, note that many lounges have a dedicated kids area, like a playground. For me, lounges have been some of my most well spent money on vacations when shit hit the fan.
Don’t entertain the complaining. It’s not going to change anything, it’s not going to make anything better. The only thing it accomplishes is makes everything worse for everyone involved. I would tell my wife she can either be part of the solution, or part of the problem.
Any travel plans that involve things outside of my control, get buffers built in to factor for that. And even something like a road trip where I AM in control of departure times, etc., nothing is set in stone, there is flexibility in everything.
They serve alcohol on planes for a reason….
The Serenity Prayer…Frank Castanza version
Im so sorry you’re going through that. It’s okay to lose your cool in healthy ways. It’s just tension. Scream into a pillow, have a cry, whatever. Feeling overwhelmed and not having immediate solutions for everything doesn’t make you a failure as a father/husband/person.
This will pass and things will stop being overwhelming and you’ll be okay.
Maybe just complain as well? Sometimes women don’t want a solution but to be understood
You can’t be TOO stoic otherwise the panicky person gets annoyed like you’re not taking it seriously, you gotta show a little frustration just at a lower level.
Then you gotta give her a chore to keep her busy and help her relax and get a break without saying “you need to relax”. Instead say “Here’s my card, can you walk around the terminal and find some snacks while I sit with the kids?”
Admit to yourself and your wife that “this sucks.” Just like sometimes your wife wants to vent and doesn’t want solutions, just for you to say “that sucks.” Just accept that there is much, especially when traveling, that is out of your control. Talk to your wife and say “this sucks, and there is nothing we can do about it right now. But I need your help to keep it together.” The baby is crying and she is grouchy, your mood is fading. You need to pull together and remember you are on the same team.
Hang in there, man!
I start with the understanding that my wife makes plans and I adapt to how the plans don’t work. So when it blows up, I know that my part is finally beginning. And my wife and I know this about each other, so we both know that she’s going to make plans (and contingency plans) and we both know that I will know them and adapt to changing realities to allow as much of the plan as is reasonable to still occur. And we trust each other to fulfill our roles.
Embrace the suck. You cant fight it sometimes shit just sucks. Accept it, know its gonna suck and know you’l get home and it will end. I find that less stressful, to just be like “yep this is hot shit. Yep. Ok now how do we survive?”
I’m a problem solver. I focus on fixing all the things that need to be fixed. I also assume things are going to go wrong and build slack into the travel arrangements and have back up plans. I also travel with people early when dating to see how they deal with the stress of travels. But at the end of the day when things are going wrong that’s frequently when I’m flying high. And I’ve found that being able to tell other people to sit back and relax, “I’ve got this” tends to be a calming influence.