I'm sitting despondent at my friend's house in Oxfordshire, England, trying to zip up my overstuffed suitcase while listening on the phone to the bewildering rail timetable for trains to London. Once off the phone, I sigh deeply in frustration.
My friend, a young Englishman who read my first travel book and e-mailed me in Canada saying he was a "fan," looks at me disappointedly and says, "Your reputation as a hard-core traveller is being shot to hell."
It's true: I'm a mother of a three-year-old, and clearly, I've forgotten how to travel.
I used to tour the world with a backpack, hitchhiked across several continents, slept in caves and hollowed-out trees, camped on tropical far-flung islands and negotiated Asian metropolises where I didn't speak a word of the language. All this wasn't very long ago, either.
Now, I'm in Britain on a book tour for my second travel book about more intrepid treks through jungles and places north of the treeline.
But instead of a backpack, I'm lugging an unwieldy suitcase, can't figure out these trains and tubes for the life of me, and feel a little panicked about arriving in London. And this is England, where they speak English!
How did I manage crossing Sumatra on my own? How did I survive 17-hour bus journeys over potholed roads crammed into the back corner of the bus, the only female onboard, while men all around chain-smoked clove cigarettes and wouldn't let me open the window even though we were on the equator, the hottest place on the Earth? They even showed a porno flick on one of those buses, and all the men turned around to stare at me.
But when it comes to travelling, I seem to have become a wimp. Actually, I seem to have forgotten how to live in the regular world entirely. My life can be divided into BC (Before Child) -- when I was that independent girl who could have adventures and stay up until 4 a.m. writing about them -- to AC (After Child), when I've emerged as my mother.
Having spent so much time at home over the past three years, being sleep-deprived, nursing, playing with Lego, reading Winnie the Pooh, and wheeling my son to the park in a stroller, a trip alone to another continent is like going to Pluto. How ironic that I'm here for a book tour about my worldly travels. I've become the furthest thing from worldly.
I'm now at Marylebone station in London waiting for my old university friend Shazea to meet me. She's late, and I'm getting a little anxious. Am I in the wrong place? Did I take the wrong train? When I was 23 in a situation like this, I would have sat on my backpack, pulled out a book and relaxed while waiting. Now I'm standing, tapping my foot, looking frantically around, checking my watch. Again, I've become my mother. No, wait, I've become a mother: I fret, I worry -- not just about my own child, apparently, but about everything else too.
Shazea finally arrives, a little panicky and apprehensive about being late. Surely this isn't my old roommate Shazea, who used to dance for hours, go to parties with me, have guys lick Jell-O off her toes before dashing off to hitch a ride home so we could watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns at 2 a.m. This Shazea is a little, well, uptight. Could the explanation be that Shazea is also a mother?
In my son's first year, I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and would have given anything to go back in time to my former free self. My son had colic, and I was so exhausted I could barely walk straight or remember my name.
I wanted to escape to a village of women, back to the Jamaican village I had stayed in years earlier where the large extended family of mothers, aunts, cousins and sisters all shared in the child care. That seemed the only natural and humane way to survive being a new mother -- far better than an isolated couple trying to figure it out on their own.
