Adults Grow Up Too

I’ve written a lot about how we travel because of what it can teach the boys, how it can broaden their minds and grow them and make them into confident, responsible adults.  This isn’t just talking about strictly travel, of course, it means all the other things too, the day trips or the choosing to go somewhere new instead of where we have always gone before. 

But this last trip to Paris really highlighted something totally different and yet the same; it’s not always about them. In fact, every trip, I’m always amazed at how much I grow up too.

When Joe was scheduled for a conference in Paris on a Monday and Tuesday a few weeks ago, we all went the weekend early to see the sights. 

Look, things haven’t exactly been stress free over here lately. Joe is trying manage his way through an entirely new position (not just to him, but in Amazon), and I’m navigating how to fit our Florida furniture in a Luxembourg apartment and how to homeschool for the first time with European requirements and neither of us are killing it, shall we say. I mean, things are getting done but not in a #bossbabe sort of way. (Is that a thing? I don’t even know.)

But we moved here partly so we could travel, so we went. 

You know, I can write all day long about how important it is that my kids know how to find their way on a map and read a subway station map, but did you know I had never ordered a taxi until this Paris trip? Like, in my whole life? 

And I don’t know if this is a failure of not being taught right or just something that doesn’t quite compute in my own head, but the number of times I forget to calibrate my surroundings with a cardinal direction is astonishing. The steps to knowing where things are in the map and how they correspond to where I am standing are ALWAYS the same, yet, I forget every single time, either to look for a landmark on the map that I can see, or to note which direction on the landmark that is and therefore which way it is for my own two feet. 

I just don’t naturally have whatever it takes to do that. 

And honestly it took us about 3 big cities (Tokyo, Rome, Washington DC) to get how to tell which direction a subway is heading and how to know if you’re on the right side of the platform. (I still triple check and panic every time.)

So this trip was for the boys, sure, but in Paris on Monday morning as we were leaving and Joe was at his conference, the boys and I walked to the grocery store which I found on the map, called the taxi to take us to the train station, found our train platform and car number and seat number, and when in Luxembourg caught the bus home. 

I know on Instagram and in all the places people like to pretend it’s easy and not hard and that so many people around the world navigate that sort of thing every single day.

It’s no big deal to manage correctly the three different forms of transportation in a different language, but for me that’s just not the case. And I know that there are people who can do it well. More specifically, I also know that most people who have been the places I have been probably know how to do all those things better than I know how to do them.

But it’s always a stretch for me, and I always learn something new every time. (So much for teaching the boys.) I am always put in some sort of situation, at least one, where my anxiety hits the roof and I have to breathe and I wonder why the people next in line are laughing and if it’s about me because I have asked to get a ticket wrong three times in a row, or I mess up reading the map, or I don’t know when to pay for a cab.

But every trip, and especially this last Paris trip reminded me that the boys aren’t the only important ones. 

Sure they get to see new things and learn, but do you know what I get to do? Read maps in other languages, step off a train in the middle of who knows where and find our way to beds and food, and figure out if we are going the wrong way to the right place, and know to be on the lookout for pickpockets. 

And if that’s not growing up, I’m not sure what is.