My maternity leave was also running out. By American standards, I was lucky to have had about four months of paid leave. My husband was only able to take three weeks of basically unpaid leave. So I’d pretty much been solo parenting our newborn since then. I was a wreck. My anxiety was through the roof. I was exhausted. I needed help, and we had no family nearby in the US. My husband hatched this crazy idea that I should travel solo with our son and go stay with my mother-in-law in Istanbul for two months while working remotely.

A million thoughts and feelings swirled as I contemplated this: how unfair it was that my spouse’s job was so demanding that he couldn’t be home right now. That we couldn’t afford to risk his job to have some balance in our lives. What, he wants us to go away for two months?! Followed immediately by the sadness at imagining him alone at home for that long, and wondering whether and how it would affect his bond with our son. And how on earth was this the option that made the most sense – that there was no village to help us here, so I had to go someplace where a village sort of existed.

Ironically, perhaps, not one of those anxieties revolved around me basically living alone with my mother-in-law. She had her quirks, but was an exceptionally easy person to be around, and we’d spent plenty of time together when we all lived in Amman. My in-laws are Palestinian, and despite our different backgrounds – and the fact that Middle Eastern mothers-in-law don’t exactly have a reputation of being easy going – she only ever made me feel like one of her own kids, like family. Never judged for my cooking or clothing or how tidy my house was. We could sit on the couch in our pajamas and watch movies together. We’d go grocery shopping and would cook together. When I was working on my computer, she’d ply me with cups of tea and snacks. 

Best of all, it was a relief to be around someone who knew what they were doing with babies and knew what kind of help I needed. When my son woke up at 6 am after keeping me awake all night, she’d tiptoe into my room and whisk him out of bed to play with him, bringing him back whenever he wanted to nurse again. She’d been a schoolteacher and a family therapist, and God bless her, had raised my husband, his twin brother, and a younger sister, as a single mom in Jordan in the 1980s. She’d gotten divorced when her kids were young, fighting social norms and a court battle that stretched on for years. 

Now, she was enjoying a modest, but comfortable retirement in Istanbul. She rented a two-bedroom flat in one of Istanbul’s innumerable towering apartment complexes on the European side. She was close to the metro line and tramways and had everything she needed close at hand. She regularly took us out for “lunch” or “shopping” that would turn into an all-day adventure of 20,000 steps, involved trains and ferry boats and taxis, all to eat at a cafe that had good cheesecake, or a good Syrian restaurant clear across the city. I didn’t mind. My first full day in Istanbul with my son, we went out on one such journey, ending up in the Grand Bazaar in Fatih, then walking along the Bosphorus at the newly developed Galataport (a ritzy dining and shopping area) – all places I knew well and had seen many times. 

But as we navigated the packed bazaar with the stroller and I saw my son’s eyes following everything, taking it all in, as shopkeepers bent to pinch his cheeks and strangers helped us lift his stroller over old stone steps – I felt part of myself coming back to life. I’m still me, I thought. My heart felt ready to burst as all these places I knew and loved felt new again as I watched my son seeing them for the first time. 

Traveling was different now, but absolutely still possible. Traveling was still exciting, and all the more interesting, as being a parent, I was now exposed to different cultural experiences that I’d never had before. When I went to a hair salon, the hair stylist took a break halfway through so that I could nurse my son, and another employee held and cuddled him the rest of the time. My son was too little to play on the playground yet, but we spent hours watching local kids play and chase each other, occasionally chatting with other moms. We enjoyed the family-friendly Ramadan nightlife around the Eyupsultan mosque. We took him to the nighttime Tarawih prayers at Hagia Sophia. We saw thousands of tulips bloom that spring in Emirgan Park. I introduced him to his first solid foods on that trip, exposing him to the many flavors of Turkish and Arabic cuisine. He rolled over for the first time at my mother-in-law’s apartment.

My pregnancy had been filled with worry. I’d read countless stories of mothers who never really felt like themselves again after having kids. Who never got to do anything for themselves again after kids. Who, it seemed, gave up everything they were ever interested in or passionate about – and that the default expectation of mothers was to be this unquestioningly self-sacrificing, and to do so in a state of pure joy. 

When I look back on this time of travel in new motherhood, it’s with fondness, but also a twinge of sadness: I will literally never get to do that again. Even if I have another baby, my son will never be that little again, I imagine it will be harder to disappear for two months when we have things like school schedules to consider – even if I tried to repeat it, it wouldn’t quite be the same. It was absolutely the best thing I could’ve done at that time. Crawling back into the world post-partum was hard, but doing so in a culture where babies and children are valued as a normal part of social life, where motherhood is revered, and with someone who offered me grace and support during that period, made all the difference.