I never was one who could easily jump headfirst into the pool – easing myself in, pinky toe first and then one step at a time just seemed to make so much more sense. I’d always been practical over dreamy; my life was that of a typical working mom. And yet somehow, Alex and I are now seriously contemplating 2 whole months of international travel… with tyke in tow. I had lost my mind.
True to form, this particular fledgling had quite the nudge out of the nest. I found myself laid off after a decade and a half of pretty much contiguous professional work and I’ll admit it was pretty emotionally jarring. I was petrified. I spent the first couple of days letting it sink in, feeling panicked and ashamed and then switching to being practical about things like medical benefits and figuring out how to pay our rent. How long could we comfortably go while I looked for a new job? We had moved back to Manhattan and rented out our Brooklyn place for this job and still had a few months left on the lease. Oh god, how do you even look for jobs these days – it had been years since a job hadn’t come looking for me and I had no clue where to even start.
Alex, on the other hand, was busy dreaming up an amazing scheme that in many ways has been my salvation. He always could manage to see only silver linings when all I could see were the darkest of storm clouds. Why don’t we just get out of town for a while, like waaay out of town and like a loooong while? He pitched it to me like this: Leo had just turned 4, so he’d get something substantive out of the trip and we wouldn’t really have to suffer the consequences of pulling him out of school. We’d already paid the last month’s rent on the apartment, so it was a sunk cost and we could move back to Brooklyn when we came home. Why not look at this as an incredible opportunity – when would we ever have the chance again to have THIS MUCH UNINTERRUPTED TIME?
We all ask ourselves the, “What would you do if you won the lottery?” question. And just like that, everything fell into place as I wrapped my brain around the ultimate luxury for me – travel. We never had the means to do it when I was growing up so as soon as I could afford to, I made myself a promise that no matter what, I’d get at least one stamp in my passport, every year, for the rest of my life. Other than the year I was married and the year my son was born, I’ve made good on that resolution, so this epic trip sounded like perfect escapism.
We would use my severance package to travel, Alex would arrange 2 months of leave from work and the job search would figure itself out when we return. My job had been incredibly rewarding but also incredibly difficult and perhaps this was just the renewal and period of introspection I needed to figure out what I wanted the next step to look like anyway. So I suppose deciding to actually take the leap was the tough part. Planning and executing would be fun and effortless by comparison. This was the stuff we were good at!
Epic Trip 