Going Gypsy: One Couple's Adventure from Empty Nest to No Nest at All

by David James

“We will drive to Pacific Coast and follow south to the end of South America, where we find a boat that accommodates the autobus and go it to New Zealand.”

  Hans politely gave me a moment to let that all sink in.

  I still had some nagging keeping-up-with-the-Joneses feelings when I compared BAMF to some of the half-a-million-dollar showcase mansions-on-wheels we saw on the road—heck, right in that parking lot. There was always someone with a bigger, shinier new toy. But BAMF felt like Graceland compared to the über-pared-down lifestyle of this family. My brain was bouncing between sheer awe and what-the-hell-are-they-thinking. I went with awe.

  “Wow. I thought we were crazy—you guys are amazing!” I said, giving my still attached-at-the-hip toddler friend a squeeze. “Are you having fun, Michael?”

  “Ja!” He replied with a baby-toothed grin. Luckily he used the only German word I knew. Well, besides bier. That would have been a weird answer.

  When Ana returned, I offered up BAMF’s shower to the little family, and to my delight, the offer was enthusiastically accepted. It was the least I could do—when one has such luxurious appointments, one mustn’t ever hesitate to share.

  These road meetings usually end with a bit of horse trading, and Ana suggested we do some book exchanging. Books, a commodity traded between travelers like prison cigarettes, are well loved, dog-eared, and much coveted. In a world with little storage and even less television, people turn to reading. It warms my soul.

  We said our good-byes with hugs, curly-top-of-the-head kisses, and bon voyage wishes, then the Magic Bus putted westward.

  Though the past few months had been a joyous, raucous ride, I still found myself obsessing about how people were perceiving me. I’ve always had trouble with what people thought of me, and motherhood exacerbated the situation. I had to be perceived as the best mom, the best wife, the best at everything. I would pick apart every fault I had, pile it on myself as unforgivable, and light the match. My skills as a housekeeper provided much of the kindling. My mother kept a home so clean you could make soup in the toilet. Never capable of keeping up that level of spotlessness myself, I was always mortified by my dusty baseboards when people stopped by. Seriously. Mortified is not an exaggeration.

  I’ve never looked at the world through eyes that seemed able to see the conventional route as the path forward. The struggle to fit my square-peggliness into society’s round hole had caused me much grief, even landing me on the therapist’s couch in my thirties. It took a lot of work for me to accept myself as odd, but I’ve been tentatively letting out the slack on my weird rope ever since. So far, it’s been working for me.

  So why did I feel one-upped by this couple and their two-year-old? I thought I was being free, true to myself, and a little wild. Now I had to think about driving through South America? Could I ever be the kind of person who has the fearless fortitude to do something like that?

  And what about little Michael? What kind of life is in store for him? How many languages will he speak, cultures will be part of his makeup, and ideals will be infused in him before he becomes a man? What will that man be like?

  I had learned long ago not to judge others’ parenting styles. I’ve seen some very unconventional moms and dads raise some amazing kids in my time. I will always be the first to speak up on behalf of neglected kids, but short of negligence, I don’t give much credence to what society deems the right or wrong way to rear a child.

  The Abby Sunderland story comes to mind. Remember Abby? She was the sixteen-year-old sailor who, while attempting to sail her vessel around the world solo, found herself stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Her parents took quite a bit of flack over the situation.

  I had looked at that story from many different angles—and, as is usual for me, my feelings were mixed.

  The helicopter mommy in me shouted, What the &#*% were her parents thinking?! But my empower-your-kids side saw things differently. I too have a child with dangerous dreams: The Boy, who has been flying airplanes since he was thirteen.

  Sure, I’ve heard all the arguments—the most dangerous part of the flight is the drive to the airport . . . blah, blah, blah. Let me tell ya, when it came to plunking my junior high school–aged kid at the helm of a single engine Cessna, I quickly called B.S. on that line of logic.

  When The Boy came to us with stars in his eyes and told us that he wanted to take flying lessons, my initial reaction was are you freaking kidding me? Luckily, David stayed calm and gently peeled me off the ceiling, and we discussed a game plan.

  As with all of our kids’ endeavors, whether it be violin lessons or rodeo clown school, we required multiple beggings to prove that we were dealing with more than just a passing whim. And beg The Boy did—relentlessly. So we agreed to one free introductory lesson.

  Unfortunately, after the flight, The Boy was hooked. In response, we upped the sneaky tactics ante to test his resolve.

  I arranged for The Boy to work for a local pilot in exchange for lessons. I was convinced that cleaning planes with kerosene under the vicious Caribbean sun would quickly cure him of his crazy obsession. Nope. In fact, I’d never been more disappointed in one of The Spawn for having so much pride in their work. I’d pick his reeking, sweating, smiling butt up at the airport and hear nothing but excited accounts of airport activities all the way home.

  I gave in. Aviation was in his blood. The Boy had found his passion. I couldn’t find a fear strong enough, or an argument sound enough, to tear him away from his dream.

  My terror didn’t ebb as the years went on. I forced David and The Boy into a pact. I was not to hear (or overhear) any talk about these subjects:

  —Stall training (also referred to as deadstick—nice, huh?)

  —Flying under the hood (yup, wearing a hood over one’s head to simulate flying with no visibility)

  —Spin training (self-explanatory)

  To name just a few of many.

  If he was actually going to do this, I needed to be blissfully unaware. And I was—for three years.

  The Boy had set the goal of flying his first cross-country solo at the earliest legal age, sixteen. Because we lived in the Virgin Islands, that meant allowing my baby to go up in a plane—all by himself—and fly a hundred miles across the two-mile-deep ocean to Puerto Rico.

  The Boy was my only chick left in the nest and, to add to my dismay, his equally horrified sisters began calling home several days before the flight with helpful remarks like:

  “Mom, this is crazy,”

  and

  “Mom, please don’t let him do this.”

  I appreciated their concern, but the last thing I needed was more fear-provoking input.

  Heading to the airport, I was a calm-on-the-outside nervous wreck. I was well aware that it wasn’t going to do The Boy any good to have a terror-stricken Mommy hovering over him, so I kept a proud-parent brave face. And I did feel real pride in my son as I sat on the sidelines while he fielded questions from newspaper reporters that his equally proud instructor had tipped off. Local Boy Flies Solo on Sixteenth Birthday. It made good copy. This was, after all, a lofty and rare achievement.

  So, like Abby Sunderland’s parents, I let him go.

  And like Abby Sunderland’s parents, I got the scare of a lifetime.

  My memory of what happened next is vague—I was so petrified that my brain can’t fully recall the details. At the time it was most unhelpful that I had purposefully kept myself ignorant of aviation lingo.

  About an hour into the flight I received a phone call from an airport in Puerto Rico. The woman on the other end explained to me that The Boy had never closed his flight plan. They didn’t know where he was.

  I did what most proactive people do when they can’t be proactive—I handed the phone to David and became a comatose blob. I was incapable of comprehending any of the ensuing conversations David engaged in. I just sat there like a petrified lump.

  The eternity that seemed to pass while David and The Boy’s instruct
or anxiously sorted out the situation was, in reality, probably only about twenty minutes. Without a doubt the longest twenty minutes of my life.

  It turned out to be a simple miscommunication between two airports, then a phone call to the emergency number (ours), rather than the proper contact number (the instructor’s) on the flight plan.

  Having gone through this experience gave me a glimpse into what Abby Sunderland’s parents must have felt when Abby was lost at sea. It’s not possible to explain this unique mingling of terror and guilt.

  Where is the line between being a parent who supports a child’s ambitions and a parent who enables dangerous behavior? I don’t have enough information to make a judgment in the case of Abby’s parents. I can’t know how well Abby trained to make her passage possible, but my guess is seriously and exhaustively, just as The Boy did for his flight.

  It is also likely that, like my son, Abby was so focused on her objective that she did not engage in many of the all-too-common behaviors that endanger teens every day. I tally this on the plus side of having a kid with a passion.

  Would I allow my own child to sail around the world by herself? Probably not. But then, none of The Spawn are sailors. Abby’s parents would probably have reservations about sending Abby up in a plane over the Caribbean all by herself.

  The Boy went on to study aviation science in college, pursuing his commercial pilot’s license. While I still refuse to listen to the scary stuff, I couldn’t be more proud of him. I’m also proud of myself for not letting guilt, fear, and selfishness get in the way of my child’s dream.

  Now, I wanted to apply that attitude to my own life. Learn to be fearless like Hans, Ana, and Michael, or Abby and The Boy. The latent drive lurking beneath my recovering helicopter mommy exterior was getting my attention. It was time to let it take the driver’s seat. I had disentangled myself from a traditional home, job, and way of life, but didn’t feel mere disentanglement was the end of it. There was more to come.

  I was figuring out who I was. The final outcome remained more than a little hazy; after all, what was a helicopter mom without a mission, a SuperMom minus her minivan, a mother sans child?

  The time had come to do some serious envelope pushing. To purposefully venture outside of my comfort zone and face my fears in order to become fearless.

  Will I be accomplishing the giant feats of my newest friends? Of Abby and The Boy? Perhaps not.

  But I knew I was through with baby steps.

  23

  Fear Conquering and White-Water Rafting

  Bozeman, Montana, turned out to be a gem in a number of ways. The little mountain college town had a lot to offer two road-weary Gypsy-Nesters—boundless horizons, lofty peaks, quirky eateries, and a wonderful sense of humor about itself that we couldn’t help but relate to.

  Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that Bozeman winter temperatures were what they were, we might have considered it a future nesting place.

  So maybe we wouldn’t be settling in Montana, but I was ready to stay a while. To my surprise, David was on board with the idea too, and not just to prove that he was learning to lighten up on his gotta-get-there mentality. He was feeling a bit of nostalgia being back in the Mountain West and had found all sorts of interesting activities in the surrounding area. He was talking about staying for a week! The wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am travel may not have been all the way out of his system, but at least we were slowing it down.

  It was late summer, a glorious season in the Rockies. There was an exciting energy in the air—additionally charged by my (finally) becoming acclimated to the altitude. I began to generate a bit of a wild hair (in addition to the one on my eyelid). The one-upping by the sweet little German family clearly had a stimulating effect on me, and though driving through South America may never be something I would do, I certainly could conquer another one of my many fears in its stead.

  The reasons behind the need to conquer those fears had me delving deeper into my psyche during our downtime. I understood why I had become so fearful regarding my children, that had been obvious to me from the day The Piglet was born. Mommies protect their children, period. I may have been a bit over the top in my methods, but I’d be surprised to meet a mother who disagreed with the principle.

  However, I didn’t stop with the kids. I was also overprotective of myself. While the chicks were still in the nest, risk taking was not an option for me. What would happen to the kids if I did something stupid and died? Or worse, if both David and I died?

  When we had date nights, worrying about finding a sitter wasn’t worrisome enough for me. I envisioned a drunk broadsiding us in an intersection, a bomb blowing us up in a movie theater, or an E. coli–laced prawn taking us out mafia hit style at a romantic candlelit restaurant. With so much to panic over in the mundane day-to-day, I was not about to take any real gambles in my life.

  As time went by, it became easier for me to become complacent with my fearfulness rather than to face it. As much as living in fear sucked, the thought of jumping out of my tightly woven anxiety cocoon created even more internal pandemonium.

  While I had children who needed my protection, there was a greater good, a noble cause, a reason for remaining anchored. But the time to break those chains had come. If I continued living in my protective refuge post–child rearing, I’d likely become a quivering shut-in, or possibly a crazy protector of a clowder of cats.

  Sifting through Bozeman-area tourist brochures, we stumbled upon a perfect activity to accelerate my transition from fearful to fear-free: white-water rafting down the Gallatin. The very same river that Robert Redford and Brad Pitt waded in while filming A River Runs Through It. Perfect—that is, if I eliminated the white-water rafting part.

  My trepidation didn’t stem from any danger or phobia that most might expect. I love to swim, I love being out on the water, and I am generally fearless when boating. What I was frightfully anxious about was the coldness of the water.

  I like my water warm. When I use the word bracing, it is always in a negative context. Never the one to just dive into a pool—no—I use the stairs or a ladder to lower myself inch by careful inch. No use in shocking the goods—a jolt like that could shut down the ol’ cardiovascular system.

  Obviously, capsizing into an icy Montana river was not my idea of a good time. I was fully convinced that hypothermia could, and would, happen in the dead of summer, especially since the water in the Gallatin had been snow about fifteen minutes prior.

  The fact that a helmet was issued as we were outfitted for our excursion didn’t faze me much. I understood that the rafting company had to be cautious for insurance reasons—no one wants to play rock-paper-noggin out on the river. I was calm as the three guides—who could only be described as your quintessential dudes—handed out the gear. Surely we wouldn’t be doing anything hazardous with these young whippersnappers at the helm of our vessel.

  I happily donned the ray-o’-sunshine yellow helmet, the deliciously dayglow orange vest, and the darling little waterproof booties provided to me. To top off the ensemble I chose a bright blue pair of David’s swimming trunks. I was a retina-burning vision of beauty.

  Feeling my fashion-forward oats, I boarded the van that would haul us up the canyon to our launching site. During the ride we laughed and kidded with The Dudes. I was now completely convinced that this excursion was going to be a cakewalk—sitting back, dangling my hand in the water while The Dudes paddled me down a lazy river through spectacular scenery.

  But things took an abrupt turn toward reality once we reached our destination. The Dudes got all undude-like on us. Uh-oh. Listening to their rapid-fire instructions, I was suddenly made forcefully aware of several things:

  1) The river was full of crazy big rocks that must be avoided.

  2) I was going to be drenched in freezing cold water, even if I managed to stay in the boat.

  3) The darling booties were not for decorative purposes—they were protective gear.

  4) I w
as expected to row (I found this out as a Dude handed me an oar).

  5) The reason my garments were so bright was so I could be easily located should I find myself out of the boat, tumbling down the rapids.

  I was about to board a blow-up boat with five other people, not one of whom had ever shot a rapid. Our only lifeline was one expert white-water-lovin’ Dude. Suddenly I was terrified.

  Still, I was on a fear-conquering mission and—by golly—I was goin’ in. I held fast to my oar, strode purposefully to the rubber raft, and situated myself on the bench. Our Dude perched himself at the rear, and we were on our way.

  Not so rough. The serene beauty of the canyon was mesmerizing. I actually could have dragged my hand along in the water, if the temperature hadn’t been so prohibitive. Dude was once again relaxed and dude-like, and we were back to yukking it up.

  Then came the first big bend of the river. Like a flume ride at an amusement park (one you could drown on), we were set into serious motion. The floor of the raft quickly took on freezing water. Dude was suddenly shouting out instructions—like a stoned drill sergeant—and we scurried to follow his every command.

  The helmet and in-case-of-emergency talk were not just for insurance purposes! We were paddling for our lives—and I was pretty damn sure only one person in our raft had the slightest clue what he was doing. Exhilarating!

  There can be a beauty to being scared witless. My mind held only the task at hand. I had completely put my trust in Dude—the same Dude who was bragging on his drinking antics just moments before in the van—because I had no other option. My clueless comrades-in-oars were doing the same. Somehow, under Dude’s direction, we became a powerful team of rock-dodging mastodons.

  Once we cleared the initial rapids, and the river was peaceful again, cheers of victory went up as oars were double-pumped overhead. Tales of bravado were excitedly tossed around. I felt as though I was aboard a vessel with my only friends in the world. We were a team that, together, conquered a wild river—and our fears. Collectively, we couldn’t wait for the next set of rapids, the next challenge ahead.