On vacationing alone, Part 1

How it came to pass

I’ve heard myself say that I love to travel alone. I might even say it’s one of my favorite things to do. I love being in airports alone, on planes alone, in the car alone, in hotel rooms alone. I don’t mind eating alone in restaurants. Time expands, balloons, busts open the clock. A two-hour flight is relatively short, but if you’re alone, you can sleep from boarding to landing, and two hours is a very long nap. This stance on solo travel is likely familiar to anyone who has ever attempted travel with young children, an ordeal that can make the most extroverted extrovert long for a single-occupancy bunker in which to live out the rest of one’s days. I know this specific longing very well, but I loved traveling alone long before I became a parent.

All that said, it recently occurred to me that, depending on how you define ‘travel alone,’ it was possible that I’d never actually done it.

I credit my friend Ben, a fount of good ideas, with inspiring this revelation. Ben lives in Memphis, where he is a university professor and an opera director. He is married, and he and his wife don’t have children. During the university’s summer recess, Ben travels to direct operas and run workshops. His wife doesn’t have the same flexibility of schedule, so Ben’s travels are often solo. Last fall he took a sabbatical to get additional training, and when he signed up for a conference in Oregon, he decided to make a trip of it. He flew first to Vancouver, BC, where he spent a long weekend exploring the city. He stayed in a hostel and got around town by bus or on foot, pausing for naps, to write in his journal, or for an afternoon espresso. An afternoon espresso is very Ben, as is walking 13 miles a day and eating dinner late. He likes to sit at the bar when he’s alone, because chatting with the bartender is also very Ben.

He recounted all this rapturously when he stopped in Seattle on his way down the coast. Listening to him, the concept I’d been calling ‘traveling alone’ suddenly struck me as a gross misnomer, a situation maybe better called “traveling alone to be with people,” or if we want to make it elegant, “traveling alone in company.” What I have loved is to travel alone and be received: to stay with a friend, to be swept up in the bustle of a conference, to slip into the pleasant structure of a teaching gig. Being alone this way — “alone,” alone-ish — feels easy to me, safe, obvious. It is a pleasantly contained freedom. Even if I’m working, teaching a few hours a day, here are long stretches when no one needs me, looks for me, probably even thinks of me. There’s a version of myself that I can access only then, given hours inside my head and a wide berth around my body. Here’s something that is very Molly: the desire to be marooned on my own private island of thought. The version of me that I find there is related to the person I am in my writing: they’re sisters, I think. That version of me is someone I knew well as a kid, a kid who grew up an only child and liked it very much. I love visiting her. I could stay for days, I’ve suspected, though I’d never never tried.

I’d never gone away alone to stay alone, to be somewhere else without anyone or anything for more than a few hours. I don’t know why, except of course I do: money, safety, relational ties, commitments, and the basic fact that being alone, alone-alone — much less traveling alone — is something most of us never do, especially if we are partnered, have children, and/or live in a female-presenting body.

Weirdly, my mother used to do it. When I was a kid, she went by herself to New York for long weekends. It’s not like she went every year, but she did it at least twice that I remember, maybe three times. Yesterday I asked her how those trips came about, and she remembered instantly. For a period of few years — I was probably in grade school — my dad and his buddies were in the habit of taking an annual fishing trip. Apparently, one of those years, my mother thought, Well I’d like to do something fun, too. The following year, when my father went fishing, my mother went to New York for four days, to shop in stores we didn’t have in Oklahoma and enjoy a world-class city without anyone to slow her down. Plus, she told me winkingly, it’s easy to get theater tickets when you only need one seat. TONI WIZENBERG, FOREVER AN ICON!

Sorry, Mom

In the era of my parents’ simultaneous fun-trips, I was too old to need a babysitter but not yet old enough to stay alone. My parents hired a young couple named Jan and Mike to come stay with me. Mike was kind and easygoing. I remember he kept a pocket-size print of their wedding photo in his wallet, and that his suit had been pale blue. Mike had hair like a young Hulk Hogan.

Mike’s hair, left (and no idea, right)

Jan was an aerobics instructor at The Workout, where my mother was a regular. Actually, Jan and her identical twin sister, whose name I wish I could remember, were both instructors at The Workout. They were local legends: tiny, tan, and indistinguishable, each with a glowing nimbus of permed blond hair. It was awesome, those weekends, being pseudo-parented by two living incarnations of ‘80s style. I missed my parents, but I was fine.

Anyway, I didn’t think much about my mother’s New York trips. It seemed like a normal thing for a mom to do, though I do remember that none of my friends’ moms did it. Surely money was a factor: my father was a doctor, and a dollar went a long way in Oklahoma. My family could afford everything we needed and more. But other families we knew traveled too, and not only for work, so money wasn’t the only thing keeping moms’ luggage in the closet. At some point as I got older, maybe in high school, I remember thinking back on my mother’s New York trips with a sense of wonder, dazzled by her independence, her conviction, her balls. I would do what she did, I was sure of it.

Then I went to college, got a job, went to graduate school, got another job, got married, wrote a book, co-founded a restaurant, co-founded a bar, had a baby, wrote another book, started teaching writing, got divorced, wrote a third book, got married again, and then had another baby, though I didn’t have to use my own body this time. God it takes a long time to feel like an actual adult. And, turns out, my adulthood doesn’t look at all like my parents’ — mostly in ways I have chosen, but also in ways I haven’t. Like most of my generation, my spouse and I make less money than my parents did. My children see their faraway cousins much less frequently than I saw mine, and they don’t know my siblings the way I knew my aunts and uncles. Since traveling anywhere takes a lot of money — or miles, or points, both of which take money to accrue — we don’t do a lot of air travel as a whole household. And when we travel for fun, especially, it seems only fair that everybody should come.

There’s also the fact that, wow, turns out, it can feel shitty to leave people at home. A four-person, two-pet household that normally operates on the labor of two adults is very heavy lift for one. At a minimum, the situation requires logistical juggling and additional funds for childcare. I remember how my mother scoffed when she heard that a woman we knew, a successful business owner, would spend days before any work trip in a flurry of meal preparation, cooking and freezing dinners for her husband and child for every night she was gone. But I understand the impulse: if I go away, it means more work for Ash. That makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t like to inconvenience people, especially not people I love. I was raised by TONI WIZENBERG, FOREVER AN ICON, but still I learned to be a woman among men. Thou shalt not leave thine hearth, the book says, and if thee do insist upon it, thou shalt feel bad about it, and thou shalt bear forth thine discomfort and sow from it a field of heat-and-eat meal options.

In my mother’s generation, I’m certain that most women, certainly married mothers, would never have thought to take a vacation alone. As for my generation, I think a lot of us would love a solo traipse around vacationland, but we wield the idea like we do any fantasy, something sexy that’s almost certain not to happen, or we use it as a half-joke-half-threat when our people get on our nerves.

It took me until last fall to say my fantasy aloud, to say that I wanted a solo vacation. Ash had just taken on an important commitment, something they were excited about, though it would, for two to four weeks, require more parenting work from me. I dreaded it. Hashing out the logistics one night, I just said it: So, what do I get? If you get this, what do I get?

Then I tried not to wince as the sound waves carrying my words raced toward Ash’s ears. I’d meant what I said: I wanted compensation for my labor, for helping them get what they wanted. I saw Ash swallow, and then they said, You should absolutely get something in return.

I want to go away by myself, I said. That’s what I want. I want days and days by myself. I want to answer to no one.

Let’s figure it out, Ash said. Let’s get you some time. What if you go away for a long weekend a few times a year?

I decided to believe they meant it. It was not, anyway, the first time they’d heard me wish for more time to myself — to write, to read, to whatever, I need it. That desire is part of why it took us five years to decide to have a baby: I refused to give up the mental and physical space I had reclaimed when I got a divorce with shared custody. I don’t think Ash ever took personally my need for being alone. They know who they married. But there was frustration in both corners, arguments, silences.

In retrospect, and strangely, I think the process of having Ames has made me feel more free. It required loosening my iron grip on autonomy — but then I had room to notice that, in this relationship, I didn’t actually need to hold on so tight. We have shown each other, many times now, that we can, and are willing to, survive discomfort for the benefit of the other’s flourishing. Ash got to become a biological parent, something they’d always wanted. They are a natural. I’d heard other parents say that their family felt incomplete until their child or children were born, but I didn’t get it. I’d never registered a lack, nor a sufficiency. It wasn’t a thought I had. But now that Ames is among us, we do feel complete, each of us as people and the four of us as a unit. I’d always sensed, oddly, that June would thrive as a sibling, and they do. For my part, I got a son. I got a second chance at motherhood in my mid-forties, an opportunity to rewrite a story whose ending I’d never liked. Time alone now comes at a higher premium. Pretty much anything any of us wants comes at a higher premium. But I — we, I think — feel more conviction in claiming it.

About a year and a half ago, a place called Clos Mirabel, an 18th-century manor house in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, asked if I’d like to lead a week-long writing retreat. I jotted off a quick OUI BIEN SÛR and ran screaming through the house. A phone call followed, during which a date was set in the impossibly distant future: April 12 to 19, 2025. (I’d never taught outside North America, so we wanted to allow plenty of time for sign-ups.) Somehow a year went by. Ash and I had the what-do-I-get talk — unrelated to the France gig, but timely. This was roughly October-ish, nearly time to book my flight.

When I went online to look at round-trip prices to Paris, I decided to go for broke. I entered April 6 for a departure date and April 20 for a return. I’d spend five days and nights in Paris, take a train to the Pyrenees, teach for a week, then take a train back to Paris, where I’d have one last night before flying home. It was abso-fucking unreal, before, during, and after.

I’ll have a Part II for you next week about how I planned and what I learned — in other words: tips! And there’ll be a Part III, too, with specific recommendations for lodging, restaurants, cafes, sights, walks, a sunny flowerbed wall where you might sit to eat your afternoon pastry, exquisite notebooks, cheap yogurt, lipstick, and more.

Soon,

M.