Wanderlust

I had an epiphany today.

As I went to get my passport renewed, I was reflecting on a conversation I’d had with my mother the week prior. Of course, when I say ‘conversation’ in this case what I really mean is ‘borderline argument,” because I made the mistake of explaining I was going to get the aforementioned passport and she considers this to be a veiled threat. There’s always been this odd duality in our relationship. On one hand, she’s proud of my accomplishments and has said that of her three children, she’s always worried about me the least. On the other hand, any time I mention travelling anywhere or the possibility of an opportunity that would potentially cause me to move, she is immediately against even entertaining the idea and will immediately launch into a guilt-laden monologue delivered in the way only mothers can. Most center on how she is convinced that should I actually move forward on such a possibility that I would be throwing away everything I’d worked for up to that point. Not to mention I’d be abandoning everyone I professed to love and would never see them again.

Ever.

My attempts to explain to her that the world doesn’t work like that anymore fall on deaf ears. It’s bad enough I live 200 miles away from her presently; she mentions any time we talk about how we don’t see each other enough or phone each other as often as we should. The only reason the 200 miles to Cleveland is tolerable to her is that the alternative was London, and England as a nation has been a major vexation for her from the time I was a child. It was an entire country full of people who seemed to like all the things I liked, who wrote the books I liked to read and made the music I liked to listen to and the shows I liked to watch. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting at the table in our playroom, wearing my hat and saddle shoes while I drank tea and ate cucumber sandwiches. I wasn’t ‘being British,’ I was just being me. It was a natural fit that I never grew away from, even after I went there in college – especially after I went there in college. She was absolutely convinced that I was somehow going to defect to the UK (which I’m still pretty sure can’t happen, as we’re allies), and the last thing she said before I left was a very tearful and heart wrenching “please come back.” I remember my grandmother coming down to visit the day after I got home to ask questions about the trip, pleased her granddaughter got to go on this “once in a lifetime” opportunity, and my mother blanching when I gently corrected, “Oh, no, this isn’t a one-time thing. There are more adventures waiting for me when I go the next time.”

What they were failing to realize is that in life, we aren’t nearly as limited as we want to believe. Too often we hold ourselves back from going after what we want because we think we aren’t good enough or smart enough or strong enough, that we don’t have the time or the money or the whatever. Too often we hold ourselves prisoner in the cage of our own self-doubts, dreaming of what might have been had this or that been different. I came across a quote not that long ago that read “doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.” I think there’s more than a little truth to that, and so my question becomes: how many amazing things can one fit into a lifetime, if only they had the courage to try?

Which brings me back to the passport. As I sat in my happy place among the books in the library, filling out my renewal forms while I waited for the ID photos to print, what I realized was something fundamental about myself. See, in my mother’s world, with the exception of one uncle who had been a career Air Force officer, nobody in our family had left the country since the Second World War. Before that, the last transatlantic crossings were her great-grandparents migrating to Pennsylvania from County Cork. Nobody else in our family has a passport. In my mother’s world, the only people she knew who travelled beyond national borders were wealthy or bohemian, staying either in opulent villas and luxury hotels or squalid huts and rat-infested hovels. There was no middle ground, and our bank accounts weren’t the opulent villa type. One couldn’t go jetting off for a week on the Riviera when there were crops to tend to make sure there would be food and money for the winter. One couldn’t drag one’s children through the jungles of Brazil and not expect to run into snakes or jaguars or drug lords. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t safe. Our family came from the stock of farmers and ship builders; we made the vessels for others to explore the world, not to venture out in it ourselves.

Yet here I was. The bookish one. The dreamer who wouldn’t let dreams be dreams. The impatient one who insisted on pushing forward when the others wanted to relax. The stubborn one who wouldn’t compromise on something as trivial as a pair of shoes. The one who, when told she couldn’t do something because no one else did, figured out how to do it anyway. The one who went off on her own to find her place in the world, even if it meant putting herself out there, small and vulnerable, and seeing what happened. The one who wasn’t content to read about life through the safety of a book, but needed to experience it in full-color cinematic glory. The responsible one who was willing to go all in. The one traversing the big bad internet, putting herself out there, talking with people around the world, then actually going out to (gasp!) MEET THEM.

What I realized as I sat there, scribbling out my forms and thinking on the possibilities that little pass book held in its pages, was that my mother didn’t worry about me less than she did my siblings. If anything, she worried about me more. Because I won’t play it safe. I won’t sit by and give up on something I want to do just because nobody else has tried it. I make calculated risks – calculated, yes, but risks all the same. The kind of risks where a mom can’t swoop in and kiss the boo-boos away if I fall.

I can’t say I blame her, exactly, because I know I can’t make her understand. But let’s be honest, if I were going to defect, I’d have done so already and there wouldn’t have been a damned thing anyone else could do about it. At each critical juncture of my life, I chose the path I did because it felt like the path I was supposed to be on, whether the rest of the world thought it made sense or not. I’d have been marvelous wherever I ended up, because I wouldn’t be content sitting back passively thinking about what might have been. The best I can do is go on my little adventures, write up the best stories I can, and hope somehow along the way that it all pans out.

The main thing, though, is to have the courage to begin.