I remember, when I found out I was pregnant, feeling very distinctly as though I had squandered my "freedom years". I'd done cool stuff: moved to the tropics on a whim, worked as a tour guide on a pearl farm in the Kimberley, done marine conservation diving in Madagascar and underwater scooter instructing on the Great Barrier Reef. But I didn't feel like I was done with travel. Not even a little bit done. I had barely scraped the surface of my grand dreams for wide-flung adventure. Dreams which were shrinking as my belly grew.
I managed to come to terms with my maturing reality. I nested, I birthed, and I myself was born wide-eyed and confused into the world of parenting. But I never enjoyed the four walls of our apartment. We would be out any chance we could get. Eventually I plucked up the courage to take my daughter to the Laura Aboriginal Dance camping festival (no small thing, single handed with a toddler). The struggles and triumphs of that trip could not have been waged and won inside a home. We camped next to a single mum and her 3-year-old son that had driven 3000km from Tasmania and invited her back to camp on our lawn. The simple stories they shared from their life on the road shifted my concept of the confines of parenting. It is my hope that sharing our story will do the same for others.
This is a blog about travelling with kids, but it's also a blog that speaks to the heart of what travel gives us: a new way to be ourselves.
And my child, I hope, will reflect the best version of myself and then some. It makes sense to me to provide her with countless experiences with which to make sense of the world and her place within it.
Often the guilts will strike me and I will wonder if I’m making good decisions - if perhaps stability really is as important as the parenting books seem to imply. But then I look down into my daughter’s beaming face and see all the wonder of the world reflected there. And I know that we are meant to roam. We are meant to see the sights, meet the people, feel the gratitude, and place ourselves not as the centre of our constructed universe but as shining jewels glinting in the endless sky of the universal.
Shine on, traveller.
Photo: Mangawhai Beach, New Zealand, February 2020 (Source: Author's own)
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