At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe
Tsh Oxenreider
INTRODUCTION
There is a false dichotomy spread via the modern travel section of your local bookstore: you either love to travel, and therefore throw caution to the wind by divorcing a spouse or dropping out of college to go “find yourself” on sale in some foreign night market, or you’re happily married with kids, which means you have zero hankering to leave the suburbs and the school pickup line. Sitting on my desk is yet another new memoir—fresh on the market and one I cannot bring myself to finish—about a vagabond’s quest for the open road with the motive to escape any form of responsibility. Marriage? That’s only for the conventional types who love memberships at bulk warehouse stores. Produce offspring? That’s even worse—say good-bye to any semblance of independence as you know it.
This makes me sad.
I can dispel this myth. I can shout from the rooftops that you can both love to travel and be happily married with children. You don’t have to delay familial commitment out of fear that a ringed finger means no more fun in European bars or on African safaris. Giving birth to new life doesn’t mean the death of your passport; kids are remarkably fantastic travelers and can open more doors to cultural experiences than going solo.
Ignore the books that tell you travel is the antithesis of family. To me, those two beautiful words go hand in hand. They stand together on a crowded city bus, holding on as the tires bounce over potholes, siblings who have each others’ backs.
It’s not easy. You can bet the saffron in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar that it’s far easier to pack when you’re single, and it’s decidedly much cheaper to move about the cabin. But traveling with family isn’t impossible. A love for travel, to explore new places and foods and cultures, to sleep on the cheap in the world’s grandest cities, doesn’t mean you’re not family material. It means you’re one of the more honest parents in the car-pool line.
If you’ve picked up this book in search of another story to justify your hard-held belief that kids and travel don’t mix, you might want to move on to another one. Or better yet, buy this and start reading it right now, before declining that marriage proposal out of fear you’ll never again strap on a backpack. A solid marriage, well-cultured kids, and travel? Hearty ingredients for a fulfilling life.
If you’re holding this book because you’re weary of punching your parenting time card yet one more day, I offer you solidarity with a side of hope: I can’t tell you how to travel with your kids, exactly, but I can show you what it’s like for me to travel with mine. This book chronicles my experience as a happily married wife and mom in her midthirties who never outgrew her wanderlust. Those post-college backpacking years whetted my appetite for more, and once my three kids came on the scene, I couldn’t believe my good luck: I now have three beautiful people to whom I can leave my love of travel and a worldview that accounts for the entire planet. Because once they’ve traveled, they’ve seen it firsthand. No going back. What a gift to bequeath them before leaving their childhood home.
Parenting and global travel—I can’t think of a better mix.
This is my family’s story. It’s a story about how we spent a rather ordinary nine months in an extraordinary way.
PART I
Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
—Gustave Flaubert
1
LEAVING
The prayer labyrinth is two hundred feet away and the kids are climbing rope nets on a playground next to a babbling brook. Bare feet are required on a spring day like this, textbook with chirping birds and budding leaves, as is a walk through the village park. After several hours in the car, my legs need to stretch. My husband, Kyle, returns from his loop around the walking trail, so we switch shifts, his turn on the playground bench to supervise the kids and my turn on the dirt. In the distance, the kids take turns on the slide with young locals, a revolving door of squeals and dares, the metal slide proffering a taller and steeper drop than anything found stateside, something more risky, as most good European playground equipment is.
Grass sways in tufts against the early spring zephyr, kelly green and iridescent. I walk across the gravel path and onto the grass, remove my sandals like it is holy ground. The dirt is chilly and there is still a bite in the air, not yet dissipated by the April sun; I have no idea where, specifically, we are, but I know we’re in Germany. This is our farewell to the country; we’ll soon reenter France a few kilometers away. I walk to the labyrinth.
It’s not terribly impressive and looks like it hasn’t been used for its intended purpose for maybe a decade. It’s a circular concrete interruption in the swath of grass, a winding detour on the way to a makeshift neighborhood petting zoo at the park’s opposite end. Cars drive past on one side, heading to the grocery store and dance class; teenagers recline on each other atop the park benches on the other side, examining each other’s tonsils with their tongues, oblivious to the fact that this is some sort of sacred prayer space. Ordinary life hums around this ordinary town, and I am here, alone in front of a prayer labyrinth in the Black Forest region of Germany.
I take one quiet barefoot step into the labyrinth and turn left, starting the winding path in and out and around itself in symmetry. I begin the monastic prayer I learned six months ago at the Ignatian monastery in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where a woman named Nora taught me letting go would do me well: Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me. Rinse and repeat.
We have two weeks left of our journey around the world, and it is time to begin the nebulous process of landing the plane. Prayer in a labyrinth will help.
I pray through the circle’s narrow path, stop once I reach the center, look up to the sky in gratitude, then sling my sandals in my hand and walk back to the kids. They’d enjoy this German petting zoo on the other side of the park, but I’ll need to show it to them now—we will soon drive away from this village and have dinner in France.