Traveling with Young People

On these trips I am just slightly beyond my own comfort zone, socially, definitely physically, geographically, etc. So I get all fussy and worried and hypersensitive. I sometimes have the impulse to withdraw and sulk, which I may have done when I was younger, but now usually don’t have time for—the exigencies of practical life take precedence. The fussiness continues, but the hypersensitivity doesn’t exist much any more.

I do think of myself as in a different category—both positive and negative—than the young women. They are in an earlier phase of life, everything ahead of them, open, while I have made the big life decisions already and am just working on doing the life I have chosen for myself. I am married, settled in my career, have mostly raised my children, my personality is fairly well set in stone. My bad habits remaining are minimized or I’ve learned to work around them (laziness mostly, fearfulness, passivity), while the students still have hopes of complete personality overhauls, or don’t understand themselves at all. They feel (I remember feeling, all evidence to the contrary) that they are infinitely malleable, perfectable—and then they often blame their own lack of will-power when they are not.

But they are also beautiful, courageous, open and learning—which often I am not anymore. They are enthusiastic and exciting. I am not jealous of them or wish that I were young and starting out—but I am sometimes nostalgic for my own youth. I don’t really want to be their mom on this trip, but I recognize my responsibility to them as younger people, young women, to support them and take care of them when they need and want it. I see how on this trip I provide a necessary counterbalance to John, give him an opposite and partner. [2005]