Born again…

May 2006 would change my life as I knew it from there on out. 16 years young, just days after completing my sophomore year of high school I was boarding a plane headed anywhere but the small Alaskan town that held my residency. A town where we were never going to be what each other was looking for, from politics and worldview to quality of life and diversity—it wasn’t going to be a match. The flight was the door opened to so much of who I would become. My rebirth. The journey of getting away was started.

My first trip to Paris was everything a young girl could ask for: beautiful sites, a taste of freedom, alluring French men and women speaking the most enchanting language, and the intoxication and appeal of something different than anything I had known before. I was falling in love, and fast.

It would be some time before I would visit my long distance love again… something like 10 years, in fact. Our reunion would not just be our own, but I would be introducing a new companion, someone I hoped would share this same affection. My husband, Daniel, and I spent 6 magical days in my city, walking her streets, tasting her sweet collation, getting drunk off her infectious sense of freedom, and finishing the days gazing into her shimmering eyes. He was hooked. Maybe not by her alone, but he was hooked. Travel would forever be in his blood, flooding his mind with daydreams, and he, like I, would continue to chase these feelings daily.

As it does for most couples, the thoughts of babies and a family started to settle in. Now our browser history was more ovulation schedules and less Google flight searches. After many years of trying with no success, and even a failed IVF treatment in the beautiful city of Prague, we found ourselves lost. In all that time of struggle, the pain had caught up and it was soul crushing; so we turned to the thing that made our mind forget and hearts feel whole: travel. We immediately sought after our love, Paris, and began planning our next trip. If it wasn’t going to be babies for us, it was going to be travel. I hoped her warm embrace would heal parts of my heart I knew I couldn’t on my own. Within days we had it all worked out and in a few short months I’d be with my love once again.

In that 3 months of waiting, we were blessed with our first pregnancy and the thoughts of having my baby in my belly with me through Paris was euphoric. Once I had coped with the lack of wine I could consume on this trip, the fun began. First we would do our announcement photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, then the baby would enjoy the scrumptious flavors of all the macarons I could eat, and lastly, and most importantly, they would experience the wholeness and happiness of their momma in her most favorite of places; I couldn’t wait. Sadly, just weeks before we were set to take off we lost the pregnancy and that high I felt became a deep low. But again, I would ask for her to be there for me, help me see the beauty in life around me, share the power and resilience that she has held over all this time. And that she did. We took the photos we had planned as a loving tribute to us all. We ate, we drank, we smiled, and we healed.

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat, Pray, Love”

So now you might wonder how I got to this crazy place of creating a blog mapping out my Parisian  travels past and future, but that’s just it…the crazy. 19 months into a global pandemic will do that. As many of us experienced, I had felt an abrupt halt of life, onset of loneliness, and distance in more ways than one. I started longing for the old ways of life, relationships, a sense of self. All of that has sent me into a constant inventory of myself: How am I, who am I, what am I, what do I want? You get one life, what are you going to do with it? It has really woken up my heart and mind to how I want my life journey to go, and how I want to enjoy life. Daniel and I have never had the most traditional life views on many topics. Our interests and ideals tend to be different…What we want from life hasn’t always been the most “common” or “typical” but we always tried our best to stay true to what was right for us, our family, and our future.  

That leads me to where this is all going… It’s been 1,473 days since I last set my soft brown ankle boots, my trusty Parisian walking companions, on the bustling streets of Montmartre, and my mind hasn’t stopped doing the “travel shuffle” since. The shuffle of finding any money in our budget, any time off we could muster up, any perfect flight time to return to the City of Light. Even now with two bouncing baby boys—Len, 3 and Brin, 1—we still find ourselves trying to rationalize all the daunting details of traveling abroad with small children. So after many months of feeling a bit lost or disconnected from anything grounding us here, we have again immersed ourselves, and our computer, in the dream (now turning to reality) of introducing two more beautiful beings to the City of Love, our sweet Paris.

More to come…