My son had disappeared. While I strained to catch every third sentence from our Beefeater tour guide at the Tower of London, Wells, my 8-year-old, had walked off. Finally I looked down and spotted him sitting outside our scrum of tourists. “Mom, I can’t hear anything he’s saying,” Wells stage-whispered. My suggestion to “just scooch closer” was met with a dramatic eye roll. “I’ll just wait over here until the tour’s over, Mom,” he said, stomping off.
“He’ll thank me for this later,” I thought as I spun around and tried to rejoin the tour, smug in the knowledge that I was fulfilling a dream to show my boy one of western civilization’s most important historic sites.
Flash forward three months later: Like a Pop-Tart sprung from a toaster, I watch Wells fly above the Caribbean Sea. My husband has just launched him from an inflatable blob bobbing off the shore of Bay GardensBeachResort & Spa on the northwest corner of Saint Lucia. Nearby, on a floating trampoline, a pair of elementary school-aged sisters from Rochester, New York — my son’s new best friends — cheer his aerial acrobatics. He Evil Knievels his way along the resort’s massive floating Splash Island waterpark, then races back to the girls, the three falling into a heap of giggles.
I have never seen my only child so happy on vacation.
That’s when it suddenly struck me: Maybe I’ve been approaching the whole family travel thing all wrong.
I’ve always dismissed amusem*nt-related trip activities in favor of educationally enriching attractions, believing I was expanding my son’s horizons. Give me that Tower of London tour over go-karts or Dave & Busters any day. Yet, in the bright light reflected off the West Indies sand, it all seemed so clear; this instinct primarily satisfies my own travel preferences. I thought I was unveiling the riches of the world to my kiddo. But really, the only wanderlust bucket list I’ve cared about is my own.
I thought I was unveiling the riches of the world to my kiddo. But really, the only wanderlust bucket list I’ve cared about is my own.
In my experience, this is all too easy to do as the mother of an only child. In many ways, having an only — a booming demographic that accounts for the fastest-growing family unit in the United States— is a boon for travel enthusiasts. From a math perspective alone, the cost benefits are overwhelming. Just ask any family of five who has flown internationally lately.
My husband and I have used this to our advantage by taking our little trio on trips from Burlington, Vermont, to the Scottish Highlands and stopping at every historic site, museum or nerdy literary landmark on the way. My husband is a high school history teacher who never met a historic plaque he didn’t pull over to read. I grew up in a family of thespians who spent hours doing community theater. We’re like the poster kids for liberal arts education. So naturally, when we travel, we follow culturally stimulating itineraries. For instance, when we took our son on his first international trip to England last summer, we bypassed the London Eye, the city’s enormous Ferris wheel that Wells begged us to ride, to expose him to “Hamilton the Musical” (second row, center seats, of course). Did he cry during the second act because he’d lost a souvenir in the lobby during intermission? Yes. Did I feel it was more important for him to power through his snuffles to experience a once-in-a-lifetime West End-caliber production? I did.
And our old-timey all-the-timey journey didn’t end there. We made him climb Hadrian’s Wall. We hiked in the rain to Lindisfarne Castle and visited more battlefields than I care to recall. Don’t get me wrong, our son is a trooper. After a rock star usher at “Hamilton” recovered said souvenir after curtain, Wells told us he loved the play. He showed genuine amusem*nt at most of the sites we took him to. That’s all that any parent could want: to see their child share and appreciate some of their interests. But I’m beginning to realize that in our enthusiasm to raise our own young Indiana Jones, a very privileged position — one might say the very definition of #firstworldproblems that I try to never take for granted — we may have overlooked opportunities for our boy to participate in more good old-fashioned holiday fun.
