Because of Someone’s Words

“Funny how a single word can change everything in your life.” Pierce Brown, Red Rising

It is funny, huh? How powerful words can be? I’m a reader. I read all the time. Everything. Books, articles, menus, signs, graffiti on overpasses. I am constantly scanning, reading, skimming. And every once in a while, something I read stops me in my tracks. Stays with me. Sometimes, something I read won’t leave me alone. Sometimes, something I read even changes my life. 

I wasn’t expecting anything that profound in the summer of 2018 when I was flipping through my latest issue of  National Parks magazine. I was casually skimming, watching my twin girls play. Or probably fight. Let’s be honest. They were just under three years old at that time. So they were probably fighting. So I’m sure I was only half reading, half making sure my kids didn’t scratch each other’s eyes out over some blocks. But then this article stopped me. 

It was an article about families. Ones who had looked around at their traditional life and packed it in. Hit the road traveler-style to educate their kids on the road in our National Parks. “Roadschooling,” they called it. Cute, I thought. A sweet play on homeschooling and road-tripping. I was fascinated. Bucolic pictures of a sunset-drenched airstream, apple-cheeked kids laughing, descriptions of idyllic afternoons spent exploring and wandering. My own world receded, and I read that article twice and then a third time. Who knows what my twins were up to at that point? Let’s just be thankful they survived because I was in deep. I was hooked. I wanted that. 

When my husband, Travis, came home, I showed him the article. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” I mused. Wistful. Dreaming. “Yeah, it would be.” He admitted. We wondered over the story together. And I knew it had him, too.

He is a kindred soul. An explorer. An adventurer. We both long to see everything possible in our short time on earth. You’d never know it to look at us. House in the city. Garden in the back. Trav marched off daily to his stable job as an architect, and at that time, I was nurturing a budding career as an education consultant. Two kids. Two cars. A yearly vacation to someplace south of us. (Okay, everything is south of Minnesota really, but still). And it wasn’t that we were unhappy with any of that. We were content. We had jobs we loved. Family and friends we adored. A life together that we both were proud of, that we found joy in. 

But I had stepped into mothering our twins with a keen awareness of how fast time goes. When I met Trav in my late 30s, I was a single mom with an 18-year-old. When Trav came into my life, my daughter, Sarah, was getting ready to fly the nest. I had come through the toughest part of raising a whole entire human being on my own, and wondrously, we were both largely unscathed. I was proud of the young woman she had become. But holy Hannah, that time had gone by in a blink. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she was cuddled up next to me, holding my cheeks in her happy little hands? 

And now here I was, starting over. And somewhere in the stunned haze of those first years of parenting twins, I promised myself I would pay attention. To all of it. The sweet hand-holding moments and the fits-in-the-middle-of-the-grocery-store moments. I had learned about time. Besides, we were old parents now, with our 50s looming on the horizon. Our own time was racing by. 

Pair my urgent fear of running out of time with my lifetime of recurring bouts of depression and anxiety and some tenuous post-partum mental health, and I felt myself almost panicking about those proverbial sands through the hourglass. Travis understood.

In our souls, we were still the same young kids who each had backpacked around Europe in our 20s, who loved to escape to the woods on the weekends, who gobbled up history and documentaries and wanted to see all the places in person. We were the same couple who spent time riding camels in Egypt and hiking volcanoes in Iceland together. We hungered for discovery. We dreamed of sharing our love of learning, of adventure with our kids. 

The article took hold of both of us and didn’t let go. Over the next few days and weeks, the article came up, and we were no longer saying, “Wouldn’t that be cool.” Now, we were saying. “We could do that. Maybe not forever. But surely for a year.” “Let’s do that.” and eventually, “We are going to do that.” 

And that was it. It had grown from a seed of a dream and began to blossom into a full-blown plan. We decided we would hit the road ourselves. Explore our National Parks. Roadschool our kids. Adventure. 

And so yeah, it’s funny. Someone’s words changed the course of our lives. This fall, we will be leaving! 

Oh, don’t worry. I am not foolish enough to believe it will be all bucolic countryside and idyllic days. It will be challenging. There will be rainy days and bad decisions. There will be crankiness and crying. Some of it even from the kids. And I would also be foolish not to acknowledge the incredible privilege we are afforded to be able to do this. And it will be only temporary of course. When we return, there will still be a house in the city, a garden in the back. 

But I already know that none of us will be the same. I anticipate that our hearts and our souls will be altered somehow. We will come home better for having gone. 

All because of someone’s words.