When i was young i thought my life would be more exotic than it has been. I thought i would travel. I wanted to discover Africa, India, China. I wanted to be immersed in them, live in them swallow them up so they became part of me. But instead i had children. 1, 2, 3. Lots of people have children & still travel. I guess that i wasn't adventurous enough to make it happen. I was scared, when i conceived my first, you could say she was planned, planned in as much as two naive 19/20 year old's plan,"Lets have a baby, wahey, yes lets, I had no idea about what that decision really meant, for me, or for my child. When i got pregnant, my family's response was mixed, my aunt wrote advising an abortion, my granny on my father's side told me she never wanted to see me again, my great aunt on my mother's side, who'd been deaf since she was twelve, knitted my baby clothes to wear and wrote telling me she thought i was brave to keep the child. I appreciated her support which i took personally but it may also have stemmed from her faith as a catholic & the value placed on the unborn child. 

I suppose that my aunt & my granny were also responding from their belief systems. My aunt was a career woman, childless herself i think she would have seen having a child as a bad choice. My granny had had to give up work when she married & marriage & motherhood i think had been disappointing maybe frustrating & perhaps that as well as disapproval about my child being illegitimate, affected her response. Marriage & motherhood can be frustrating & disappointing, and my chances were limited by my being a parent. These were things i could not imagine in the arrogance my youth bestowed upon me. 

I thought i was beginning my happy ever after. I'd always wanted children, i didn't know what else i wanted. Having flunked my A'Levels university wasn't an option & even if i had got into somewhere through clearing i think i wouldn't have fared much better in that environment than i did in school. I was pretty clueless & didn't know who i was at that age although of course i thought i knew it all. 

Pregnancy was an adventure, physically i sailed through it, i put on only the weight of my baby & was back in size 10 (that was model size back in the 80's) jeans within a week. Her birth was not traumatic & her father was loving & caring with me & with her for about a year after her birth. But things changed & our relationship foundered, we split up then got back together for enough time to conceive our second child before the drama with my older sister described in the previous blog - i didn't know then that what happened was just a single night of thoughtless flirting & not a longer more meaningful affair, i found that out 25 years later when asked him straight out. After that Steve & I limped to the end of my second pregnancy knowing that breaking up was no longer an if but a when & not long after Richard's birth i found myself parenting two small children alone. 

Is that an excuse for not chasing my dreams. Lord love me i tried but my try as i might i could never make my dreams reality & every time i seemed to surface I would hit obstacles that stopped me again. When i was young time felt boundless but also I felt like my life-blood was dripping out of me drop by drop as i lived a life that was confined by responsibility, lack of money & fear. In my teens & twenties 30 seemed impossibly old. Funny, now even my youngest child is close to that age & the others have passed it. Are they old ? No.

Even at the great age of 30 tho' dreams of adventure still hung in the ether like mirages in a desert. It is dumb really to think back and call that time desert because i've been lucky enough to have always lived close to flowers & birdsong & the years i spent bringing up my children were not mis-spent & now they feel like solid ground but elsewhere seemed better then. It's a trick we play on ourselves, looking over the fence & thinking our neighbours/siblings/friends lives are better but it took me decades to find a path that felt right, felt like my path.  

Does that mean that the paths i took before were wrong ? I don't think so because i would not be where i am now if i'd chosen other ways & as the saying goes "as one door closes another one opens" but in choosing a door we create the shape our lives become. Moments slip by & at some point as i see with my mother and feel already in myself i realise there are dreams that feel out of reach because i failed to fulfil them earlier in my days. I travelled by exploring the cultures of other places through books, art, music, film, dance, yoga, shiatsu & sometimes friendships with people more resolved in the practice of travel than me who landed close to my home allowing us to connect for a while. But the smells & the sounds, the breath in & breath out of other lands is not really part of my body & weakness in me makes me think it will never be which gives me deep sadness. Body time is linear & tho the body carries memories it living trajectory is forward, always forward, maybe i will still fulfil my travel cravings or maybe my spirit will give me strength in the next body, if i return in physical form, to be the wanderer i always wished to be.