The Backpacking Housewife: The Next Adventure

I wiped my tears and blew my nose and pulled myself together.

Zoey is a lovely girl and, although we’ve only just met, I immediately approved of her.

I see the way Josh looks at her and it’s clear that he loves her and that she loves him.

That’s good enough for me.

Oh goodness—my boy has become a grown man in my absence.

After an hour or so, Lucas and Josh and Zoey, said they had to get on as they had previously made plans for the day. It was a Saturday, so Mum insisted that they all come back again tomorrow, for Sunday lunch. Just knowing that I’d be seeing them the next day to catch up more on their lives made seeing them all leave a little easier. Then, once they’d gone, Mum insisted that she and I go upstairs to sort through her wardrobe to find me something warm to wear. I was incredibly tired. I just wanted to take a bath and have a good long sleep. But I knew that if I gave in to the jet-lag now, then I was likely to be wide awake in the middle of the night.

I followed my mum up her narrow and carpeted staircase, thinking that despite the generous gesture, I really didn’t want to wear any of her clothes. But I was hardly in a position to refuse.

She emptied the content of her entire wardrobe onto her bed and made me try things on.

Her trousers were all two inches too short on me. Her dresses were too wide. At least we were the same size in shoes. In the end, I chose a matching brown wool sweater and skirt ensemble and some one hundred denier tights and a pair of sturdy tan brogues. Teamed with Zoey’s jacket, I felt like a twenty-years-older version of myself, trying too hard to look trendy.

Once suitably clothed, Mum said we needed to ‘pop out to the shops’ to buy some more teabags and enough food for tomorrow’s family lunch. I stifled another yawn and checked my phone, wondering if I had any messages, only to find the battery was totally flat.

I put it on charge while we went out to the shops in mum’s old car.

Mum drove us and it was a terrifying experience. I’d felt safer in a tuk-tuk on the streets of Bangkok or hacking my way through the jungles of Borneo or fleeing pirates in the South China Sea than being in the passenger seat of my mother’s little car. Had she always been this bad a driver or had this only happened over the past year? She seemed to have lost all her road sense and also her sense of direction. The route to town was incredibly busy and the traffic was stopping and starting at every roundabout and set of traffic lights. It was now early-afternoon, but it was quite dark – twilight at best – and it was still raining heavily. The roads were so wet that they reflected every passing car’s headlights and my tired eyes felt dazzled. Mum chatted non-stop the whole time that it took us to get to the shopping mall, animating her laughter and conversation by waving her arms around her head, instead of holding onto the steering wheel and focussing on the road.

I sat rigid with fear in the passenger seat as we ran a set of red traffic lights and narrowly missed being hit by a lorry. The irate lorry driver had the nerve to stick his fingers up at me, while mum seemed oblivious to any other traffic on the road and drove around the roundabout twice because she’d missed the turn off onto the by-pass.

Eventually, after battling with an automatic ticket machine and a barrier at the entrance to the underground car park, we arrived at the shopping mall and found a space to park. I wearily followed mum’s hurried steps inside, where thanks to a blast of hot air from a blower over the entrance door, it was warmer and more comfortable.

There were already Christmas garlands decking the shopping aisles and a huge Christmas tree, fully decorated with lots of twinkly lights, stood in the main square. It looked quite wonderous. I stood staring at the tree for a moment, feeling surprisingly emotional and suddenly extremely grateful for being back here. It was all such a wonderful relief.

I turned to my mum and hugged her warmly and wiped a tear from my eye.

She hugged me too, laughing at my unexpected show of affection. Then she suggested that while she went into the supermarket, I should go off and buy myself some new winter clothes.

I agreed it was a good idea and we said we’d meet up with each other again in the square.

I know this mall very well. I know its lanes and avenues like Ethan must know the waters of the Caribbean. I must have walked through here many hundreds, if not thousands of times, as a housewife. I used to come here several times a week to do all my shopping.

Yet today, it doesn’t feel at all familiar to me in the same way it once did.

I really don’t understand it because all the shops that were here before are all still here.

Yet, it’s like I’m having a déjà vu experience and attributing it to another lifetime.

It feels surreal to me. I’m noticing things that I’ve never noticed before. I see how incredibly pale and pallid and stressed people look as they rush around and pass me, pushing loaded shopping trolleys, prams and pushchairs, dragging screaming toddlers, all while chatting incessantly into their mobile phones or to each other. There are so many droning voices being punctuated by piercing high pitched shrieks and background music and other sounds that it has all become a buzzing white noise to my ears. It’s bouncing off the steel and glass and cold white tiles that clad the walls and floor of the shopping mall.

It feels quite suffocating and all consuming.

After spending so much time in the third world, where people have so little by comparison, everything here suddenly seems so abundant and glossy and extravagant. Shop windows are full of unpractical stuff that no one really needs but will buy because its Christmas. People proudly carry a clutch of bags showing off that they’ve been and bought the big brands.

Clothing. Shoes. Cosmetics. It’s all so excessive.

But I’ve never noticed it before. Not that I used to be any different. I used to do it too.

I once felt it was important to have the designer handbag, the new coat, the right shoes for every occasion, and a new dress because I couldn’t possibly be seen out in the same one twice.

Not to maintain modesty or to keep warm but to impress and keep up appearances.

A child, of maybe ten years of age, ran into me without an apology. He’d almost knocked me off my feet but without a care he yelled and swore at me as if it had been my fault we’d collided. I noticed how well dressed he was in an expensive premier league football shirt and training shoes. The same branded trainers that I know my son Lucas loves to wear.

For some reason, I was reminded of something that happened to me not too long ago when I’d been shopping for fresh fruit on a street on one of the lesser known of the Caribbean islands.

The shops on the street were just wooden tables, some made from old doors, piled high with a selection of locally grown fruits or they were simply a battered looking wheelbarrow that was filled with ripe bananas fresh from a nearby tree. A young boy, again around ten years old, had spotted me doing my shopping that day and was soon running alongside me to beg to be allowed to carry my shopping bag. I guess that with my western looks and my blonde hair, I’d been an easy target for his attentions.

‘Let me help you, lady. Let me carry your heavy bags today?’ he pleaded so politely.

I’d been immediately charmed by his smile and his entrepreneurial spirit and so I let him carry my bag containing a few mangos, a couple of pineapples, a hand of bananas, knowing that I’d be soon asked for a dollar in return. The day was scorching. Blisteringly hot. And, as we walked along side by side, with the sun beating down on our heads and heating up the hot hard dry sand base that formed the street, I could feel the heat burning through the rubber soles of my flip-flops. Yet, I noticed this boy wore no shoes. I asked him ‘where are your shoes?’

And he simply smiled at me and shrugged and then shook his head.

And that too had made me stop and reflect on how in the western world we have so much.

A thought that I suppose simply wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind before I’d travelled.

Of course, we confuse the price of material things with the price of happiness, don’t we?

It’s only by stepping out of the material mindset that we can appreciate that confusion.

But I do need some new clothes today. I need some practical clothes to keep me warm.

So I head across the mall to a shop where I know I’m likely to be able to pick up what I need for a reasonable price. It’s a charity shop where I used to work several mornings a week as a volunteer. Where, for many years, I’d worked with the same group of women who I called my closest friends. One of them, Sally, had been my very best friend in the world.

I used to confide in her. We’d had a laugh together. And a cry, sometimes, too.

But I didn’t want to see Sally today. Not yet. Not now.

Not dressed in my mum’s clothes and looking red-eyed and exhausted.

I know that’s incredibly vain of me, but I’ll freely admit to being a proud woman.

In Buddhism, pride and vanity are considered poisons, as they are part of a selfish ego.

No doubt, here in this small suburban town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone else’s business, I will bump into Sally soon enough. But, by then, I hoped I’d be more up for the challenge. More prepared. Because, if I was being honest, the thought of seeing Sally again filled me with anxiety and dread and a great dollop of despair.

What would we say to each other after what had happened and after all this time?

It’s not as if the past year has changed what I saw or diminished what she was doing with my husband in our marital bed on the day I came home unexpectedly early. If anything, it has amplified it. It’s like that horrific moment has being preserved – frozen in time – until it can be properly addressed and Sally and I face both the consequences and each other in real time.

Yet seeing Sally used to fill me with joy. She was my best friend.