We've just come home from 3 weeks abroad and I feel renewed. I feel like myself. That's a huge call because I've been winging for yonks that I don't feel located in me.
Being a mum is bloody incredibly. I love how it forces you to transform what you knew (pre-baby) into something more, a new renovated version of what you had and held as knowledge and habit. I often wonder if women redecorate and renovate their environments with a certain vigour when they have children because internally they are in a constant challenging state of spiritual and mental redecoration and renovation of the self. I feel that way anyway. Becoming a mother has slowly changed me completely. Renovation and home decoration can become a pathology, perhaps.
A good and easy example the forced change that comes to me with motherhood is travel. How I travelled before being a mum is extremely un-okay for child travel companions. I never knew what I was doing. I would go wherever with whomever and land somehow on my feet after a significant free-fall through what seemed reasonable at that time, in that space. Transgressions came and went. I was safe and happy. I love how travel creates its own punctuation marks in the narrative of your life. No forcing, moments just happen and cease. You go on a journey. And then it ends. It changes you. A full stop becomes an exclamation mark without any effort. I love that. Regular life chapters feels much more laboured and difficult to scribe.
Now, though, I'm a traveller again. But this time in a wee team: hubby and child and me.
I'm learning all over again how to do this thing that I'd pretty much moulded into my own shape. It took me years of experience to make my journeys mine. Now they're ours.It's still going to take some time till I adjust to group travel mode. Last OS trip I was in constant struggle. There were some pretty huge question marks flying at us on that trip, but they became full stops and eventually new chapters ... but they were struggle and then they became peace.
Best of all, while in Tokyo, came a moment when I looked at James and Rita and felt that this was my best journey ever. I remember many times in the past while travelling that I wished that I was with a partner and our child. Lone travel is lone. It's a ball and it's wild and fun, but it's lone.
So, now I'm learning how to travel boldly again, but small steps this time, there's a child on board. Japan wasn't especially adventurous; in ways it was. It was extremely good fun. It was transforming. We did good. It was celebratory.
I love tripping (and falling).
