Single Mom in the Wilderness

Wandering Home + The Launch of Actual People Season Two

 

There are a couple of weeks every summer where my kids go away with their dad and I’m suddenly and abruptly alone. I'm a full-time single mom. Their father lives 9 hours away and visits a few times a year so it doesn't matter how much I plan or who I’m with, the experience always catches me by surprise. All the emotions I've shelved in neat emotional boxes during the year come tumbling down. I'm flooded with new and uncomfortable sensations. First there’s the loss of my mom identity and then there’s the return to an identity that I am no longer very familiar with, me as an autonomous individual.

Re-entry into the world of the self is bumpy, but on top of that, we all come out of those early child-rearing years with a changed brain and a changed body. We’re also all living in a substantially changed world. I come face to face with this new iteration of myself once a year and I always have a lot of catching up to do and never enough time to get there. When I do start to get the swing of things, it’s always around the time to get back to my normal life something I’m eager to do, because god damn it I miss my kids.

This summer I went to New Zealand. A former co-worker and good friend had moved there before the pandemic with her Kiwi husband and invited me to visit and explore the North and South islands. Getting on that plane was a more humbling experience than going to Paris or London, where I took my kids last summer, because there, I had context. I’d lived in Paris and spent a lot of time in London, but this was me exploring a part of the world I knew very little about when my day-to-day life consists of kid drop off, the grocery store, exercise, and that meditative mecca of calm that is a mother's trip to Target. 🧘🏻‍♀️

Once in New Zealand, I found myself struggling to orient myself and unearth the part of my brain that’s able to make snap decisions in a large foreign city. It was an exercise in a renewed consciousness of self and a renewed consciousness of my environment. Most of the time, I'm thinking about what my kids need, but I had to think about what I need and what I didn't need, and that was oddly difficult. I’d fallen out of practice.

It was also tough to just accept the moment and accept myself.

In the end doing dishes and laundry, meeting deadlines and chasing clients, signing kids up for camps and sports, keeping my house neat and clean, all of that is easier than looking at myself and what I need.  I found myself experiencing a deep sadness during this trip which I just couldn’t shake.

I don't normally feel deep sadness at this time of my life, I don't have the time, but ever since we lost our dog Elijah three months to the day of when we found him, a floodgate of emotion has opened inside me, or more realistically,  a steady open tap of grief. And that tap has not abated.

So while I’m feeling this general feeling of ennui, I’m also witnessing absolutely astonishing beauty. I couldn’t escape either so I just accepted the experience and wrote everything down. 

On the trip we went to a lush geothermal paradise called the Waimangu volcanic Valley which was once known for beautiful pink steps formed by geothermal springs where wiped out along with the entire valley when a volcano erupted 1866. What Iw as seeing was an entirely new ecosystem that rose from the ashes. Life again. 

With no one else around to spoil the experience, we saw the largest geyser-like feature in the world, the largest hot spring in the world, we saw black swans just floating on by us, and steaming bubbling streams in pink blue and cream evoking early Star Trek episodes and of course, Jurassic Park. We saw palm trees that looked like hula skirts and we heard birds that sounded like R2DT. We drove an hour and walked through Redwoods to get to a place called Huka falls where 220,000 liters of bright water fall every second. This was the only place swarmed with tourists. The next day, we got on a plane and went to Queenstown and rode ebikes over swinging bridges and visited wineries. We took a 5 hour bus ride and a boat ride through the fjords of Milford sound. We saw penguins and seals and jaw dropping waterfalls.  You can hear more about the trip and hear those birds (the Tui) on Episode 1 of Season 2, of Actual People which is out now.

And then back in Auckland, my friend discovered that she had COVID and I found myself alone for the final full week of my trip. There was nothing I had to do, nowhere I had to be. I was in an empty space of wandering, where I had to be with myself, for myself.

One morning, I found a yoga class and afterwards walked down to the cold beach when the tide was out. A short cliff, like a soggy biscuit, sat at the end of the beach.  The sea was as flat as glass.  There's something about looking out onto a sea with no reference point in my education or history that conjured the smallness of existence, the vastness of what is out there. and the blip that is our lifetime. 

The sun was bright and all was still. Out of nowhere a strong cold wind picked up and it shook me from the doldrums that I was feeling. It felt like a cockle shell necklace placed over my head at a party and then the rain came and moved fast pelting the sand and me. The wind blew in great gusts. I started to run along with everyone else on the beach and then it all just stopped, and the sun shone again.

I think this big rain was a step forward because I spent the rest of the day wandering Auckland talking to people out on the streets of the city. It is kind of a wonder how I ever could have left New York, because this is one of my favorite past times. Talking to strangers in stores. On the very last day I rented an ebike and rode the curve of the beach of Waiheke island alone, still feeling a bit trepidatious, but definitely getting the hang of it. I missed my kids intensely and was happy to be boarding that plane the next day, one day closer to seeing my little girls. When I got home, I had this nagging feeling that I'm ready for change. I'm not sure what it is. We're in this extremely high stakes election. All of us sick of the inflation, of our rickety economy, our teetering democracy tired of having to see the big red faced bully persist no matter how much proof we have of his demented nature. 

I was going to try to pull a lesson from one of the two books I bought my kids on Māori myths and legends, but they are so detailed that I wouldn't be able to do them justice, and I don't want to minimize them, but I did find a Māori proverb that tells us to ‘aim for the highest cloud so that if you miss it, you'll hit a lofty mountain.’ I take it to mean that while we don't have control over exactly what happens to us, we still must focus our energy in a place that will bring us the most joy and peace so that even if it’s not what we think it will be, we're bound to end up in a better place for ourselves than if we scatter ourselves wantonly.

Listen to Actual People, Season 2 Episode 2, wherever you get you get your podcasts.