Essay

Sometimes regaling your kids with stories about your adventurous past can come back to haunt you. In our early 20’s, my husband and I meandered through Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru. At the time, people thought we were strange. Why weren’t we buying train passes and backpacking through Europe? South America was a cheaper destination but also, it was more exotic and mysterious. I’ve never regretted that trip as it came at a unique moment in time before we settled down to real jobs and structured lives. Years later when I became a suburban carpool queen and believed that my daring spirit would forever be clogged in loads of laundry, cheerios squished under car seats, and nights with never enough sleep; I would let my mind wander to a path along the Urubamba Valley or a misty Santa Marta sunrise.

It didn’t come as a surprise when my daughter wanted to trek by herself in Nepal or live in Wyoming for a few years. She had grown up listening to my stories about hiking to the Sacsahuaman ruins outside of Cuzco, Peru and riding a mule in the Andean foothills beyond Otavalo, Ecuador. While in Nepal, she was good about faxing messages and phoning when she could. I admired her self-confidence and her strength. The Wyoming move was harder for me because it was potentially long-term. I fought back my tears as her favorite stuffed animals, books, sweatshirts and ski boots spilled out of boxes onto our driveway.

Our older son has had his own forays. Moving to Manhattan right before 9/11 and dealing with the physical and emotional chaos that ensued was challenging enough. Last winter after months of training and preparation, he summitted Kilimanjaro, went on safari in Tanzania, and swam in the Indian Ocean by the shores of Zanzibar.

I shouldn’t have been astonished by our younger son’s choice of a destination. As he quickly pointed out to me: “Mom, you had South America!” So I explained that Burma, now known as Myanmar, is a closed country meaning it doesn’t have formal ties with the United States. He stated the obvious, which is that his father and I were in Cuba a few years ago and that too is a country without a diplomatic relationship with ours. But we were on a group tour, and he and his girlfriend will be on their own. My mind can play dangerous tricks. I think about Amy Tan’s recent novel “Saving Fish From Drowning” in which she writes about American tourists kidnapped by rebels in Burma in order to make a point about the military junta in control there.

I know there are good reasons for traveling to countries that are beyond the radar screen. When we come back and talk about our experiences, we beam light onto those who live there. We also broaden our own frame of reference and our appreciation for different viewpoints and cultures. I should be grateful that he wants to step outside the usual and explore, that he wants to seize an extraordinary opportunity before he settles down to serious commitments that will prevent him from taking off for weeks at a time.

It’s true that I’m proud of the young man he has become and even awed by how well he manages. I guess it’s inescapable that kids digest what they’ve heard from their parents and fashion their own journeys. The days are long gone when I could attempt to protect him. As my friend Lindsay marvels: “Don’t you remember the nights when they dragged their quilts into our bedrooms and fell asleep on the floor by our beds?” When they were small, we often wondered aloud if our youngest children would ever sleep through the night by themselves.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll need to meditate, take deep breaths, and many long walks.