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.
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.



