People are always remarking that I take my kids everywhere. They're right, we do. My husband and I see each weekend as a opportunity to explore, but by explore, I mean we're not global explorers, we keep it local. It's more of a practical choice. When I was a grownup without kids, the ONLY thing I wanted to do was travel abroad. I dreamed about it, made plans in my mind to find a place to skip off to for a year. "We'll work as nannies in Europe somewhere," a friend with a similar case of wanderlust had suggested. "Let's do it," I'd replied. But we never did. Soon after, motherhood and marriage hit the pause button on my wanderlust.
There was a period in which I spent the bulk of my time trying to find my inner French woman. For about a year, my schedule allowed me to indulge in three French classes at the same time. I took courses at a local college, at my local
Alliance Francaise and joined a book club in Woodside where we read French classics (ok, well, I stumbled through it, but I didn't care, I was poolside with my fellow francophiles, eating brie and drinking strong coffee.) When I wasn't studying all things French, I was busy making plans to visit France. My wonderful friend Claire and I would schedule time off work to go play and have early morning caffeine withdrawal feuds in France. We had friends there and when no one was looking or listening, we'd pretend we were French. I remember driving home from the Quimper factory in our little rented car, chatting away in rapid fire, cringe worthy, broken French, just the two of us, Frenchies for the drive home. In a crowded room, I can still hear a French conversation float to the top of all that noise, taunting me to chase a life I didn't have.
For many, the whole work-travel thing quickly got old. But I loved it. Every minute. Send me anywhere, er, anywhere that's safe and has clean toilets. I would be over the moon if my husband came home from work one day and said, "They're sending us to the overseas office of xxx." I love the feeling of a hotel room and a suitcase, of throwing open the curtains and taking in a different view, of the sight of miniature soaps and too small shampoo bottles. I crave the anticipation that comes when you pack a suitcase, what new memories will be brought back? Or rather, what new
clothes will I bring back? My favorite feeling is the feeling of being lost, of stumbling into the blinding light of another country's day, jet-lagged and cranky and slightly off kilter. I like driving an hour in the wrong direction or hopping on the wrong train or telling the waiter I'm dead (
Je suis finis) rather than that yes, I've finished my meal (
J'ai finis). It's such a contrast to the city where I live now and have lived practically my whole life, where it seems there's not a street I haven't been down. I think I'm bored. It's not that I don't embrace my life as a mom tethered to home, it's just that some days I'm nostalgic for the time when the world was my playground. And before you think I'm a backpacking, stay the night in a hovel type of traveler, I'm not (though I do see
elderhostels in my future). I might have been like that back in my just-out-of college days, but now I just want to be able to retreat to a place that's tidy. But I'm not talking I must have a high-brow stay at the Ritz either; a tiny hotel room will do!
I see my friends jet off annually to see overseas in-laws; how I would have loved to marry into a family from a different
culture! The cultural landscape we see when we visit my very nice in-laws is that of Bob's Big Boy signs and strip malls, it's everyday American. What a gift it would have been to my children to have another culture (beside strip mall American) wrapped up as an everyday gift. Oh, to soak up a second language at home. Oh, to have the opportunity to complain about Indian or British in-laws. Oh, to live abroad for a year! Oh, to enroll my kids in an international school. True, my heritage is Japanese and Chinese, but it's been watered down through the generations. I pass on to my children what I can (avoiding the distilled Chinatown version) but any relative I may have had abroad is either illiterate (the Toisan side, see photo of a relative of mine) or now living in the United States (my Japanese side).
Why have I let motherhood push the pause button on my wanderlust? Simple: Money. The cost of fertility treatments and then children to raise (on one income, no less) translates into a very limited travel budget. Add to that a husband who does not like to travel (it was the one thing) and it just doesn't seem like the right time to comb through rental listings for that villa in the Italian countryside.
What I try to do instead, is to instill my love of travel into my children. They're still young, they can derive just as much out of a trip to San Francisco as they can a trip to Paris. So local places substitute for far flung locales. Instead of going to Japan, we soak up the beat of the big Taiko drums at the San Jose
obon festival while munching on udon noodles and
spam musubi. Our bookshelves are filled with tales from other lands, not just classic American tales. We tie the food we eat to the books we read; a crepe breakfast and a French children's book about crepes. We are museum goers, traveling through time and space and to other countries on the price of admission. We hike and bike and greet the great outdoors. We play on local beaches filled with kelp and
dead sea lions rather than on the pristine shores of Maui. We learn how things work. We walk through the old, non-touristy part of Chinatown and I make my boys close their eyes. Listen. Smell. I try to give them more than just a visual memory, tying it to other senses. As we pass a group of people speaking another language, I have my boys try to guess the language the people are speaking. We are often looking at maps. I'm secretly pleased when my boys mistake a nearby dead oak tree for a baobob tree. We learn about local history ("Why did that
lady build stairs that lead to ceilings?"). We took our boys to Indian food when they were just 20 months. Sometimes, I point out interesting strangers (a businessman, a tourist, a homeless person) and together we try to guess that person's story, who they are, where they came from. We play locally. If we can't get out to see the world, I am going to make sure my boys see the world at their doorstep, the local world because it's a good place to start. We are lucky to live in the Bay Area. It's a sampling of the greater world.
I hope to instill in my children the love of learning, of learning to be curious about the world around them. We may be locally bound for the moment, but that's not going to stop us from getting out. So while I can't write blog posts about adventures we ought to be having in Spain or Tahiti or even New York City, I'm hoping to kick start the travel bug on a micro level through our budget minded local travels.
Today, San Francisco; tomorrow, the world! Or Disneyland...
This is an original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.
