Coming Clean

Katie and my nephew New Years Eve 2009 Oaxaca

Ok, I give up. I sat down to write a post about our visit to the Taman Pertanian Sabah (the Sabah Agricultural Park), however my mind has, as often happens with me, taken over the reins and has gone off on a different tangent. Now you’ll have to bear with me on this one because even I don’t know where this is going to lead.

Let’s fasten our seatbelts and just roll with this.

I think I may be a fraud.

Katie and I have now been back in England for just over three months. Long enough for us to get back into a routine and definitely long enough to be adequately detached to start looking back over our round the world trip. Katie is in school now and is very happy, when meeting other mums it eventually comes up in conversation that we’ve just got back from a RTW trip, I think both Katie and I have drummed up some notoriety for ourselves. Most people, excluding Katie’s new headmaster who is totally unimpressed with what he see as my selfishness and recklessness, think what we have done is really rather cool and I have been complimented for my bravery and have been told how wonderful what we have achieved is, echoing some of the comments we have received online.

Which is where my mind has got stuck, or should I say unfastened. You see I am beginning to think I am a bit of a fraud and that is why I am struggling to write a post about an agricultural park. I set out to write this blog with truth and integrity (oh god doesn’t that sound nauseating?!), well whatever, anyway, I wanted to write about the highs and lows of travel but I think I’ve lost my way. In no way am I blaming you the reader for this, by all means those who have complimented me feel free to continue, it does my ego good. Believe me it helps that people think I am pretty cool on days when Katie has told me I am the worst mother in the world, because no she can’t have that oversized push pop candy every time we go into the post office.

Ahem…ok losing track again. I think I have tended to put rose tinted spectacles on when writing some things in the past, because I’ve just felt that I would sound like the worlds most miserable, ungrateful numbnuts if I shared how I all I could think of on a Thai beach was how horribly hot and humid it was and how my diet of pizza twice a day (because Katie discovered she liked pizza and wouldn’t eat anywhere but a pizza parlour), combined with the heat and humidity had aggravated my adult acne, triggering off numerous insecurities I have about myself meaning I didn’t want to leave the hotel room, I didn’t want to talk to anyone and here I was in paradise with loved up young couples and gap year travellers with their tight bodies and perky breasts, feeling ugly and fat. And spotty and greasy.

I haven’t spoken about another time when Katie was asleep and I found myself sobbing with loneliness and frustration because I was tired of the pressures and just wanted someone else to take over the reins for a day. Now this can happen to single mums at any time, but with the time difference there was no one to phone or expect a quick return email from. And I didn’t have the courage anyway of telling anyone things weren’t absolutely perfect in paradise.

I haven’t dared mention the time when a disagreement about room rates with a hotel owner in Laos ended up with his ‘friend’ arriving with what looked like a real gun. Did I panic and quickly rethink about what I was exposing my daughter to? Of course. Should I have returned home immediately? Now there’s a debate for you. Please comment and let me know what you would have done is a situation like that. Were things resolved safely? Yes. Was Katie shaken or scared? No she was fine, I am not actually sure how much she saw going on, she was behind me at the other end of a short corridor, outside our room with our bags. Did I pay the unfairly inflated charge? No.

I haven’t spoken about the first time we arrived in Thailand where I was literally crippled with culture shock and couldn’t eat, sleep or do anything for the first two weeks, leaving Katie confined to either the hotel, its’ attached restaurant or the pool because I didn’t want to venture anywhere else. What I wanted more than anything was for someone to fly out and return me safely to England because I was a quivering, trembling, almost vibrating, wreck.

Nor have I spoken about how it was a thin line between not wanting to return home because I was having the time of my life and didn’t want it to end, and that I was scared of coming home, of how I would adapt to ‘normal’ life, where we would live, we had no home to come back to and would be dossing on the sofa of anyone we knew who could put us up. Of how terrified I was of going back to a real life with a routine and responsibilities.

Now I don’t talk about this to anyone in the non-virtual world, it’s not only you blog readers I have kept in the dark about the non glossy side to long term travel. I did try to ‘keep it real’ with someone, let’s call her ‘A’, who told me how wonderful and glamourous my life sounded in comparison with hers when the most exciting thing she seems to do is venture outside the M25 by telling her about how we had to contend with nearly every bug we found vile and disgusting. Cockroaches, leeches, spiders, headlice, bed bugs, mosquitos…Her face, beaming in excitement at our travels, faded around about the time I got to headlice and it kind of killed the conversation dead. I wanted to downplay things but realized that sometimes it’s not so good to bring peoples expectations of what it must have been like down to earth like that, because you dash the fantasy and the dream. I know that people have lived vicariously through me and with that I have put a responsibility on myself to keep it exciting and amazing.

Another part is, I am not very good at receiving compliments and I feel a bit uncomfortable and lost for words when told I am brave or amazing, the things people sometimes call me when I’ve let the cat out of the bag as to why Katie hasn’t been in school for 18 months. And I was caught off guard with A and didn’t know how to respond so I played it all down, making myself sound ungrateful for the compliments and probably rather vain aswell. It reminds me of the old t-shirt slogan – my friend traveled to … and all they brought me was this lousy t-shirt. In my case – this mum traveled the world with her kid and all she brought me were tales of headlice.

So that’s it. Some of the not so nice part of my adventure. I hope you’ll forgive me for keeping shtum.

I guess in reality the trip was a bit like me in a way. Crazy, had it’s ups and downs, and though it was on the whole rather cool, at times it could get a little bit dirty.

And let’s face it, even cockroaches and headlice are preferable to anything outside the M25.