A Mother's World, journeys of the heart by Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael (editors)

This complilation of essay-memoirs is from the Travellers' Tales Guide series, which has a bunch of other groovy-sounding guides that are geared toward women who love to travel; worth checking out, I'm sure. Anyway, this one was given to me by imho site co-conspirator Nette. She assures me it wasn't meant as a hint for me to take up my newborn and take off again. I think I am meant take comfort in the fact that there are enough travelling mothers out there to fill a book, which I do.

This travel "guide" has accounts of mother-daughter road trips, family travel with toddlers, as well as other kinds of journeys such as one particularly entertaining story of a mother's "trip" opening night at a Van Gogh exhibit with three year-old Kira in tow. I dog-eared this poor book in many spots, every time something really connected for me: bits that I recognized, bits that reassured me, bits that articulated my own sleep-deprived hazy thinking, and also provided wisdom that would comfort me while on my umpteenth circuit walking distressed baby son. Here's a good example:

"It was May. The sea was turquoise and the casurina trees forever sighed. I was tired. For nineteen months I hadn't slept a single night without waking. JJ went to bed when he felt like it. After all, he was nine months old. He'd get up twice to feed, once at eleven and again at four. He waked up completely at six a.m. If Daddy wasn't talking to me, I got to bed at ten o'clock. I managed five hours or maybe six hours of broken snoozes. Once JJ slept all night and I woke up seventeen times to see if he was breathing.
I stood there in the hot Bermuda night. It was nearly palpable. I could feel it quivering around me full of centipedes and foolish, breeding people. Groggily, I smoothed my hair. Dad was out. The tree frogs eulogized.
For no reason I could think of I began to cry. I had a sense of desolate aloness, of being out of whack.
And then, behind me, tentative at first, then rising loud, I heard a howl.
Oh, joy unequalled! The world was stable and secure. JJ was awake again!"

Funny how that is, the way the little tyrants are so quickly missed.

---

Leave a comment

name
email (if you want to be notified)
<-- Please retype the word you see here:
Notify me when someone replies to this post?

---