Parenting Through Your Partner’s Work Travel Without Losing Your Mind

We are in the thick of work travel at our house. My husband, for some unlucky reason, happens to have four weeks in a row of travel. It’s not a huge deal for me because he traveled every week when our oldest was a baby. I just fall back into the rhythm.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy though! Back in the early days, when we were just starting out with parenting and traveling, I had to learn to simplify like crazy. Everything extra was stripped away or outsourced so I could focus solely on working and parenting. Years later, this back to the basics formula still works very well during busy travel periods.

Here are 11 tricks to keep you sane when your partner is traveling for work.

Super Easy Food

Although I think busy families with two working parents need simple food in general, I recommend taking it to a whole new level when one parent is on the road. It’s definitely good to stick to fruits, veggies and healthy proteins, but keep it is very, very low maintenance. Here are some of our incredibly easy favorites when daddy is traveling:

• Toast or sandwiches with peanut butter + jelly or nutella
• Cereal
• Sandwiches with lunchmeat and cheese – grilled, toasted or regular
• Lunchmeat and cheese roll-ups (meat and cheese rolled in a tortilla and grilled or not)
• Eggs and egg sandwiches
• Rotisserie chicken (usually lasts at least 2 meals with me and the kids)
• Red peppers
• Hummus
• Rice
• Black Beans
• Guacamole

We usually eat out one day a week when my husband travels, which we usually don’t do when he’s home. That gives everyone a break to look forward to. And I can’t recommend a grocery order service enough. Submit your grocery order online and pick it up or have it delivered. I do this every week (sometimes multiple times a week!) and it makes life so much easier. This is an absolute must-have if your spouse is traveling.

Get Help

It is so important to have another adult to help at least a little bit during this when you have to take care of the day-to-day parenting on your own. Think about the times that are toughest for you and whether you can get some help during those times. For me, the morning routine and getting everyone off to school is really tough when my husband is away. Because the kids are on two different schedules (elementary school and daycare), it’s an ordeal in general and much harder without my husband.

Morning Help

When she can, my mother in law generously helps in the morning, arriving about 20-30 minutes before we need to leave to help with shoes, hair combing and teeth brushing. Then she typically walks my older daughter to the bus stop while I take my younger daughter to school. It puts me at my desk about 45 minutes earlier, which is such a fantastic start to the day.

Evening Backup

I also struggle with bedtime when my husband is away. When he’s gone, I definitely have less patience with the girls (no one to share the burden with, I guess) so by bedtime I’m usually struggling. That is why I LOVE LOVE LOVE having a babysitter come around bedtime. Usually I schedule a weekly babysitter to arrive right as the girls start their bedtime routine.

The babysitter can put the kids to bed while I work out, run errands or just take a bath. I’m not missing that much time with the kids and it really benefits my mood to have a little alone time. It’s something to look forward to as well! (Having trouble finding a good babysitter? I walk you through hiring a caregiver here!)

If you struggle in the evenings, it might also make sense to hire a mother’s helper to come a few times a week while your partner is traveling. This could be a local teenager or someone else you know – someone who is willing to play with your kids for a bit while you make dinner/take a breath/decompress a little.

Don’t be afraid to pull in help. It’s so so nice to have another adult around to take some of the parenting load off of you  – and to give you a little adult interaction.

Discuss an Emergency Plan

You may think I’m weird but one of the hardest things for me when my husband first started traveling was that I worried constantly about the what-ifs. What if I locked my keys in the car? What if I got injured or sick or whatever? This sort of thing still keep me up at night.

One week, when my first was a baby, I let her play with my keys while I was getting the mail. The mail was right over a grate. You can guess what happened. She dropped the keys, they landed at the bottom of the grate and I panicked. Thank goodness for a kind neighbor who helped me retrieve them because I would have had no other way to get into the house short of breaking in. NOT a good policy!

Shit Happens

Also when my kiddo was tiny, I got terrible food poisoning (coincidentally the night before my husband’s first week back on the road after the baby was born). It was so bad. I was barely strong enough to walk and I certainly didn’t trust myself to carry my baby down the stairs.

I contacted my friend, who brought me some gatorade and saltines (bless her) and then got in touch with literally the only caregiver I knew of at that time – a doula I had interviewed who also did postpartum doula care. She came over for 48 hours. She went to the grocery store, cleaned up the house, and carried the baby to me to nurse and then took care of her the rest of the time. I do not know what I would have done without this woman.

But You will be OK

The point is – things will happen and you will survive. The key is to plan in advance a little bit better so you don’t end up scrambling like I did! Give a spare key to a neighbor. Have a list of emergency caregivers available in case something truly extraordinary happens (you get very sick or injured).

Agree to check in regularly with your spouse and decide what period of time without contact warrants action. I used to text my husband when I went for a mountain bike ride or trail run while he was traveling and tell him to contact someone if he didn’t hear back from my by some designated time.

Since the kids have gotten older, we haven’t had as many situations where we needed to use the backup plans, but it sure makes me feel better to have them.

Screentime is OK

My kids turn into beasts when they watch more than an hour of TV a day, so I try to keep it under control. That being said, sometimes it’s just unavoidable and I need a break. The kids usually don’t watch TV during the week when my husband is home but when he’s not? Forget it, sometimes I just need 20 minutes of quiet to pull myself together. I still try to balance it with outside time so they aren’t complete pills but it doesn’t always work out that way, and I’m at peace with that.

Get up a Little Early

I’ve found that it really helps me to get up about an hour earlier than the kids do when I’m home by myself. I usually work out in our home gym for the first 30-45 minutes, because who knows whether I’ll have enough time or energy to exercise later. Then I use the remainder of the time to get ready for the day.

When my husband is home, he typically starts the kids’ breakfasts while I shower and get ready. (He works from home so it’s just a matter of throwing on clothes for him, whereas I have to get ready to go into the office.) If he isn’t here, the kids are at loose ends while I’m getting showered and ready, which causes the whole morning to go off the rails.

It works a whole lot better if I’m awake early enough to shower, get mostly ready and maybe pack lunch or check work emails before they’re up and moving. I still cuddle with them in bed for a few minutes when they do wake up, but then we can go straight into the rest of the morning routine.

Enjoy some Solo Time

If you want to get a babysitter so you can go out, go for it. But sometimes it’s fun to stay home and just do whatever you damn well please. Back when I drank wine, I used to drink chardonnay when my husband was gone because he doesn’t like white wine. It was a fun little thing to look forward to!

I still look forward to watching things he doesn’t like on TV (I’m looking at you, Project Runway) while he’s gone. As much as I miss having him home, I also look forward to some time after the kids go to bed doing whatever the heck I want to do.

It’s not often that I get to be totally selfish, so I try to take advantage when I can. And that doesn’t always mean catching up on chores – although sometimes the best thing I can do for my mood is fold laundry while watching reality TV and I’m OK with that.

Plan a Fun Outing

When your partner is traveling, it can seem like a bit of a slog. That’s why it’s nice to build in a fun activity to look forward to. During the summer, it might be a picnic and playtime at a local park. During the winter, it could be having a picnic in the living room while watching a movie.

When my oldest was one, we used to take a picnic dinner to a local barn after daycare/work and look at the horses. She loved it and I looked forward to the change of routine. Sometimes you can start to feel a little down about repeating the same thing over and over again, so shaking it up might be just what you need.

Keep your Spouse in the Loop

One of our biggest challenges when we first became parents and my husband was traveling was that I would just make unilateral decisions regarding our daughter. Sometimes that was unavoidable, but most of the time I was just so overwhelmed that I was trying to simplify the decision-making as much as possible. And apparently that involved leaving my co-parent out of the process.

Not well done by me at all, but it was a tough time. When my husband started traveling again, I vowed to learn from my mistakes. By this point, I pretty much know what I can decide on my own and what I should include him in. I have to make sure not to just take charge of everything. It’s a tough balance and I probably still keep ownership of too much. But I’m constantly working on it.

The key is to keep communicating with your partner. Make sure to keep him in the loop on the big stuff (Jane had an issue in school today) down to the small stuff (Jim said something funny at dinner). He’ll still feel involved in family life and you’ll get into the habit of communicating regularly about the kids.

As I think about this, I wonder if other people have this problem. I’m not particularly communicative in general so this may be an issue specific to my personality!

Outsource the Heck out of Everything

We outsourced so much stuff around the house when we had a baby and my husband was traveling. Cleaning was already taken care of (we’re both terrible at that) but we also hired a lawn service. I paid for grocery pickup. We would hire a handyman to fix things around the house rather than trying to DIY. We paid someone to paint rather than do it ourselves. (Check out this long list of things you could outsource!)

Essentially, we prioritized work and time together as a family. We could have spent weekends working on stuff around the house, but we didn’t want to do that. We had the money to pay for someone else to do many of the basic household chores, so we did that. And it was 100% worthwhile.

Our level of outsourcing has fluctuated over the years, but we’ve continued to prioritize our work and our family time over doing household stuff. That’s one reason that we keep the jobs we have – because our salaries give us a ton of flexibility to hire the help we need.

Trade Pictures/Videos

This week, my husband is traveling on the day of our younger daughter’s holiday concert. She is so bummed! I promised her that I would take a video so daddy could see it too, which made her feel so much better.

We like to take silly pictures and make little videos to send to daddy as well. It helps the kids feel connected to him, and they LOVE when he sends pictures or video chats with them. They’re old enough now (4 and 6) that they can easily sit and talk with him on video, although that definitely wasn’t true when they were younger.

They have fun seeing pictures of where he is, or finding the city he’s visiting on the map. We have a big map that we can look at and mark where daddy is this week, or where he has been before.

Ease the Transition

I know that many will disagree with my stance on handling your partner’s return from travel, but I stand by it. From my own experience with work travel, I know that it can be kind of hard to re-enter. You feel a little guilty for being gone and it’s hard to jump back into family life right away. I need a gentle transition personally, and I think this works better for my husband too.

I try not to plan anything out of the ordinary for the day he comes back (flights are so unreliable anyway, so it’s hard to plan). Typically I’ll start some food in the crockpot so he doesn’t have to cook dinner (my husband is usually the chef of our household). I clean up the house so he has a calm environment to come back to.

That’s what I want when I return from a work trip, so that’s what I try to do for my husband as well. I do think it’s fair to have your partner take charge of the kids while you have some time to yourself, but I also think that it’s fair for your partner to want to recover from traveling and spend time with you. That’s a balance everyone has to find for themselves and I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to do it.

You’ll be Just Fine

The bottom line is – outsource where you can, communicate with your spouse and don’t ignore your own needs. Boil it down to the basics – work and family – and you’ll survive (maybe even enjoy!) your partner’s work travel.