The Backpacking Housewife: The Next Adventure

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To my family … with love. xx

Chapter 1 (#u4a61c14c-d8e0-5a0d-b3bd-93bbf1e7c16f)

Tortola, British Virgin Islands (#u4a61c14c-d8e0-5a0d-b3bd-93bbf1e7c16f)

This morning, in bright sunshine and on calm waters, we’re heading back to Road Town, Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands: the starting point of our round the world adventure eight months ago and today our final port of call. I gaze out from my viewpoint on the forward deck at the shimmering vista ahead of me and at what must certainly be one of the most beautiful sights in the world; a chain of tropical islands laid out like an emerald necklace.

I know I should be feeling elated, excited, or even triumphant about our return, but I’m feeling rather overwhelmed about it instead. That’s because I woke up this morning to realise that its’s exactly one year ago today that I grabbed my passport and got on a plane at Gatwick, leaving my whole life and my old life, behind me. A whole year.

And today, it feels quite literally and figuratively, like my life has come full circle.

So, while everyone else is busy and getting ready to disembark and celebrate our homecoming, I can’t help but to look back, rather than forward. I can’t help but to wonder what happens next for this backpacking housewife.

If this is the end of my journey? Or just another new beginning?

I’m torn in two by my conscience and my heart.

I have a big decision to make and it’s not going to be an easy one.

Do I continue to travel the world with Ethan? Or do I head back home to the UK?

I know that Ethan wants me to be with him. I know he loves me. And I love him.

But how do you tell someone who is something of a real-life Indiana Jones and who thrives on a life filled with endless adventure that you’ve started to think it might not be the life for you after all? That a life spent in perpetual sunshine while saving the planet has become too difficult for you? That the weeks and months and the thousands of miles of distance between you and those you’ve left behind is all too much?

I have two grown up kids and an aged mother who I haven’t seen in a very long time.

My heart aches as I realise it’s almost the end of November and Christmas is coming.

I missed Christmas with my family last year. I spent last Christmas on a tiny island in the middle of the South China Sea. If you looked it up on a map, you’d see it really is as far away from anywhere else as you can possibly get. I imagine, as far as my family were concerned, I might as well have been on the moon. On Christmas Day, I remember sitting crying on the beach, under a scorching sun, thinking of the place I used to call home and imagining them all opening presents without me, which brought on another kind of guilt. The kind that tells you how spoiled and ungrateful you are for not appreciating what you have and where you are now.

I’ve missed a whole year of birthdays and anniversaries and other special family days too.

When I last checked in with my family, via a wi-fi signal in a port of call just several days ago, I discovered that my eldest son, Josh, and his girlfriend, Zoey, had just got engaged. That was unexpected. I mean, he didn’t even have a girlfriend on the scene when I’d left.

He sent me a lovely photo of the two of them taken at their engagement party.

A party that I missed.

I’d called the happy couple as soon as I could to offer my heartfelt congratulations. But then our conversation had quickly resorted back to the question of when I might be coming home.

And that was awkward, as I really didn’t have an answer.

When I speak with my younger son, Lucas, he often sounds surly and uncommunicative and he makes our long-distance conversations hard work. I ask him about his day and what he’s been doing over the weekend and how his work is going and he’s dismissive. Call it mother’s intuition, but I worry if there is something going on that perhaps he’s not telling me?

I also worry if I even have any mother’s intuition left these days.

I could of course be worrying for nothing. But getting any information from Lucas about his life is impossible when he immediately switches the topic of conversation from him back to me. And I’m told once again, how most people’s middle-aged mothers (and I’m only forty-eight for goodness sakes) take daytrips to The Lake District and join Book Clubs, rather than go backpacking around the world and then join the crew of an ocean-going ship.

I listen and I agree. I know both my sons are missing me and they also worry about me.

I worry about them too. I worry about missing them. I constantly stress over whether I’ve done a good enough job as a mother to leave them to it now that they are both in their twenties?

What if they do need me? Even though they are grown up successful young men.

And, because I’m not there, who do they turn to if they need advice or emotional support?

Their father? What kind of example is he when he’s proved to be an untrustworthy liar?

And how do they really feel about their parents being divorced now?

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t exactly been able to talk to them about their anxieties or concerns in any depth over the past twelve months? Not since that time just before Christmas last year, when they both flew out to Kuala Lumpur to see if I’d lost my mind as well as my homing beacon. In speaking face to face, I’d been able to reassure them. Whereas now, I find it frustrating how feelings are a difficult subject to tackle by text message.

Somehow, words seem to get scrambled and become devoid of sensitivity.

That they don’t reflect what’s really in the heart.

Not to mention autocorrect issues and textspeak which often make matters so much worse.

Only this week did Josh question my overt use of: WTF.

I thought it meant: Well That’s Fantastic.

And so, of course, I’ve been using it rather a lot.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been tossing and turning more than this ship.

I’ve been losing sleep, while trying to work out how I can continue to live a nomadic lifestyle with Ethan, while also maintaining a tangible and meaningful connection with my family. But having it all seems impossible.

I don’t feel Ethan is the kind of man to step back from the helm and retire.

And I simply can’t be in two places or on both sides of the world at one time.

I’ve had to confide in him over feeling permanently at sea these days. Although, I was using that as a metaphor for our nomadic lifestyle, rather than our ocean-going situation. He’d listened to me and he’d said he understood. He said that he understands all my angst and guilt.

But, I’m not sure that he does fully understand, because he has no family of his own.

I tried to explain about my mum to him. ‘She’s not getting any younger.’ I said.

Which, in hindsight, didn’t best explain how I really feel about her needs, her age, her fragility, and not being there for her.

Ethan had simply replied. ‘Well, Lori, my darling. None of us are getting any younger.’

And, of course, he’s quite right. Yet another reason for us all to grab life and really live it.