Our family thought we had lost our minds.
But deep down, I know they weren’t surprised. To know us and love us is to understand that Travis and I have this unsated thirst for adventure. I mean, hell, our wedding vows must have mentioned adventure 35 times. This endless need to have our eyes widen, our jaws drop, our expectations challenged, to explore and to live. To “live” has differing meanings but our bond is strengthened by a shared definition of what it means to truly live (which all couples hopefully have). For us, living means experiencing the world without regrets. I feel most alive when I am on an adventure. The anticipation, the curiosity, the unknown … the adventure.
And so, when we told our families that we were leaving our dear college town in western MA to move to Dubai, UAE, I know they weren’t surprised but they certainly thought we were insane. Leave our lovely cottage, our stable jobs, our community to move to the Middle East? Who does that? Us, I guess.
When we met, our lives were so dramatically different. Earning less than 50K a year combined, in a staggering amount of debt, feeling completed overwhelmed and unfilled. But in a dark bar in Troy, NY we discussed what it meant to live and where 5 years could bring us. If we died in 10 years, what would we have wanted to accomplish? What does it mean to feel at peace about the life you have lived when the end nears? Our answers were the same and so we started making adventure the core of our lives.
Our first step was to alter our careers to areas of employment that allowed us to travel extensively. That transition set the ball in motion for where we are today. Travel became the bonus to our job and whenever possible we tagged along on the other’s trip. We also started screening flights as a full time hobby. Oh, tickets to Dublin for a long weekend are $250 from an airport we’ve never heard of? We’re outta here. We started to get more comfortable with spontaneous travel and the sense of adventure that inspired. And conversely, oh, we’re broke this month? Let’s find a new hike in our backyard. Let’s take a drive and see where we end up. Let’s just goooooooo.
There are thousands of books written on the transition to parenthood – on the morph that occurs when you welcome a little one. With the fall into parenting, there are tremendous gains and troubling losses. You jump into another realm and your life no longer becomes your own. I remember my own mother firmly (and probably nervously) informing me, “Once Hudson is here, you won’t be able to adventure like this. You can’t just drag a child around on your adventures. It’s more challenging than you can ever imagine so you should start lowering your expectations.”
*This coming from the woman who “dragged” me to London as a 2-year-old and spent her weekends bumming around the English countryside with me in tow … yah, ok, mom!
My mom wasn’t wrong, but she also wasn’t totally correct. I knew parts of me would be lost with the addition of my son, but the part I couldn’t lose was that thirst for adventure. My kid would have to adapt to a more spontaneous life. I remember our first hotel room together ... no one slept. We were missing allllllll the normal sleep aids and his beloved crib wasn't there. Horrible night. It’s taken so much work over the past 3 years to instill a sense of adventure in Hudson. And to redefine exactly what it is that we mean when we
say “ADVENTURE.” Adventures as a single woman and a mom are entirely different – but they are adventures none the less. Motherhood is, in its essence, perhaps the greatest adventure.
Adventure, as we define it, is an unusual and exciting or daring experience. Adventures do not have to revolve around travel to foreign countries. We have taken “adventures” to the playground, to the woods. We’ve found wonderful adventures at a lake or in the city. Is what we are doing unusual? Is it exciting? Do we maybe even feel daring? Adventures are all around us … this earth is the ultimate playground.
Right now, our adventures are more extreme and unique than we could have ever anticipated, but this could change in an instant. My intention here is to share our current adventures (for whomever might be curious or inspired) and when our lives change and our definition of adventure is redefined to our backyard or local park, I will share those adventures with the same pride and enthusiasm.
My hope is to highlight the joys of curiosity, the delight in the unexpected, the disappointment of failure and the wonder that can be found around us.
So, let’s explore playground earth!
With love,
- The Adventure Mom
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