I am a single mother and I made a road trip to rediscover myself

To celebrate my 50th birthday, my four sons – now, all in their twenties – organized me a beach picnic feast with friends, music and a joy fire. It was the perfect party for whom I am now.

A few months later, early October of last year, I left for my first solo road trip. It was a birthday present for me. Unlike the party, this road trip was for someone else – not for me as a mom, but for the different versions of my younger self along the way.

The first thing I excited was my portable fan. I always liked a fan, but I started to count more desperately after having become a single mother. I sleep with it, because the sound helps anchor my brain. The second was pillows. It was to bring the comforting perfume of the house.

I had a car for myself for three whole weeks, so there was space to get comfortable throughout the trip. More space than I had never had in a car. More space that I had never had in my own head.

Revisit the past along the way

The plan for my 21 -day trip was to drive from my hometown outside Toronto and head south through the border. I planned stops through Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts in places that I had never seen in real life, but, like the narrative parameters of some of my favorite books and films, had nevertheless shaped me.

They were sort of at the house of the girl I was before. Before the children, before marriage, before life made decisions for me.

“Little Women” was established in Concord, Massachusetts. It is a book that I have read about 10 times. I credit him for making me want to be a good friend, a good writer and even a good mother.

Martha’s Vineyard, about 100 miles southeast of Concord, was, for me the land of “Jaws” – the first film I saw in the theater at only 3 years old. A film to which I come back again and again.

Maine was the framework of many Stephen King horror stories – including “IT”, “Carrie”, “Salem’s Lot”, more, my favorite, “Bigotes”. The books that I kept under my bed as a pre -adolescent, reading the white nights when my body moved and grew up, and I became something completely new. Another me.

Over the years, I have become many different types of women.

And so, my goal for this trip was to visit each of them. Most importantly, I wanted to revisit my pre-motherish self.

I had my first son at the age of 21, my fourth when I was 28, and I was alone with the four against 30. I was never an adult without being a mom, never alone in a car for more than an hour. I never stopped to pee, unless at least two others were also necessary to pee. I did not get out of the highway to explore. My life had focused on the logistics of parenting.

During my first morning journey, I let him in. Loneliness, the choices I could make for me. I listened to the Spotify playlist of one of my sons entitled “Good Country”, songs by John Prine and Orville Peck, Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline. Each of my boys organized their own playlist. They understood songs of our life together and the new music they knew that I would like.

It looked like a slight push to become my own person again.

Focus on myself

Around the 10 day of the trip, I lengthened myself. The sun rose, the fall leaves were the brightest. I removed the highway and found a restaurant for breakfast. I took an entire hour to eat, drunk with the timeless decadence of time and a day full of my time.

It was the rhythm I discovered during my road trip. I led my days off and stopped when I had to work. A dilapidated hotel in Cape Cod gave me a discount for a room by the water during the offseason, and here I walked on the deserted beach, I drank coffee in my room and I wrote. I liked the solidity to work from the road.

Sometimes I stayed in an airbnb, and sometimes I splashed a little in a fancy hotel room with beautiful towels. I liked lunch on the road and dinner sitting alongside interesting people in a bar.

I met a woman in Concord who bought me a Martini and told me to go to the sleeping hollow cemetery to visit all the “good tombs”. Two Maine men became friends and invited me to them for brunch.

I spent time with a local fisherman and his girlfriend in the Martha vineyard. We ate potato skins, drunk a beer and talked about “jaws” after a long day of my own personal location. They told me that the bar belonged to a distribution member “Jaws”, the boy who had been eaten. I was presented to the extras of the film, I heard the local tradition and some good jokes

I slept so happily that night. Alone but not alone, not hampered by silence. I hardly needed my fan.

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