A young American woman I met at a conference in Semarang asked me over dinner, “Has this experience brought your family closer together?” I recognized the optimistic nature of her question, the belief that the answer must almost certainly be yes. We undertook the trip, to be sure, with the same optimism. But her question was a hard one, and not a new one for me this year. I’ve considered it when I’ve dodged a shoe aimed for my head (or another projectile, or another head), when I’ve been accosted loudly by (or have accosted, loudly) one of my children on a bus or a train or in a restaurant, when the bathroom in the hotel we cannot leave that night appears unusable, when the bus breaks down on the side of the road, when the food really is, as the direct translation from Indonesian goes, “less delicious.” Traveling inspires the most grandiose of expections, and ensures that many of them will not be realized. Unrealized expectations often turn into more unexpected and wonderful opportunities, but it’s safe to say that regular unrealized unexpectations do not immediately invoke an broad-minded appreciation for randomness and chance in most fourteen- and eleven-year-olds.
Before we left, we told ourselves that living a year abroad in a completely foreign culture – new language, new climate, new people, new food, new house, new job (new no job, in Laura’s case), new new new – would require a level of family togetherness that was, in Montana, unprecedented. In fact, this has proven to be true. But it has struck me, quite clearly, on more than one occasion, that this piece of evidence easily leads to two completely opposed possibilities. The trip has made us, at times, a louder family, a more surly family, a more irritable family, a less patient family, a skinnier family, a more familiar-with-variations-of-bowel-movements family, a more exhausted-by-your-constant-presence family. But a closer family? Tough to say, even when my kid's elbow has been in my kidney for the last 5 hours of the train ride.
I can’t pull over and leave my kid at the side of the road, not from any unwillingness to do so (trust me) but because I am not the driver, or because the car is a train (with doors that don’t open while the train is in motion). (Though ask me sometime about the time in Flores…) But traveling has, lately, become an increasingly vexing experience, especially regarding flare-ups between the kids, who feel strangely as though they might insult either loudly in whatever public place we happen to find ourselves. It is wearying, and sometimes depressing, and it tapping our resolve to take our children to new places, because they can be so annoying. (I of course am never annoying, always rational, level-headed, and deliberative – a kind of Solomon, only I might follow through and cut the kid in two.)
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I hope so.” Could we be any closer? God forbid.
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