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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.

It seemed that every aspect of who I was had been stripped from me: my identity, my body, my mind, my fierce independent streak, my writing, my travelling. Even my relationship had completely changed since my husband and I were now on full domestic duty instead of focusing on each other.

Slowly, I'm getting those things I lost back, but I seem to have surfaced as a different person. For example, when I was in London years ago, I naturally gravitated toward other travellers like myself.

"Where are you off to next?" we'd say, or, "How was India?" "Are you taking that cheap flight to Athens tonight?"

Now, I'm drawn to different sorts of people. In Hyde Park, I walk up to mothers of toddlers. "Oh, so cute How old is he?"

"Is she a picky eater?"

"Mine too."

We laugh and watch the kids play.

I used to be able to get around places without speaking the language, knew how to phrase questions so I would get honest answers, knew how to eat cheaply even in expensive cities.

Now, I have different skills: In the grocery store, I can push a child in a cart down an aisle without his being able to grab stuff off the shelves; I can traverse a dark hallway at night without tripping over rows of toy trains; and I can turn almond-butter sandwiches into jelly rolls so they look like fun to eat.

Here in London, I'm now wandering around by myself, going to bookstores, museums and galleries, free of strollers, sticky little fingers, and time constraints. In fact, for the first time in three years, I have all the time in the world.

I like wandering through the historic capital, but I had forgotten that after several days, exploring even a fascinating city can get a little lonely.

It's the last day of my trip and I'm running up a flight of stairs, heaving the giant suitcase, trying to get the right train to Gatwick Airport. I've taken the wrong train and run to the station master in this tiny outpost to ask directions. He shakes his head at my incompetence.

After waiting half an hour for the next train, I board, then at the stop for the Gatwick train, I run as fast as I can as the train doors start to close. "Gatwick" I yell into the crowd of passengers. A man sticks his foot into the door and I dive in, giant suitcase and all.

When I finally arrive at Gatwick with just 40 minutes until my flight to Canada, I discover I'm at the wrong airport. "Air Canada?" chuckles the Swiss Air man. "You should be at Heathrow."

Clearly, this is one of the stupidest things I've ever done. Ten days earlier, I arrived at Gatwick, but that was on another airline, so I really should have checked this one. Can I blame this on motherhood too?

On the hour-long bus ride to Heathrow, I try to calm down. This isn't the end of the world, I realize. Inconvenient, yes, but I'll survive. I've survived much worse -- like my son's first year.

Luckily, they squeeze me onto a later flight, and when I arrive at the Toronto airport, my son runs as fast as his little legs can carry him with his arms outstretched, straight into my own.

I may not be such a great traveller any more, but I have something else now, and can't imagine travelling back across all the years to my old self for the world.

Laurie Gough's newest book, Kiss the Sunset Pig, will be in bookstores May 19 and will be excerpted in next Saturday's Travel section.