I Am 30 Years Old and Still Traveling With My Parents

What traveling with my parents as an adult has taught me about the passage of time

When I turned sixteen, I moved out of my parents’ house and relocated eight thousand kilometers away. For fourteen years now, I have lived abroad and popped into my family’s life for about eight weeks a year. I am thirty, my parents are seventy. If I wanted to, I could do the math and come up with an actual estimation of the days we have left together in this lifetime. But I refuse to run the numbers. And yet, the question has materialized in my head: How are we spending these quantifiable, finite pockets of time?

Travel. The answer is travel. Every year, we take at least two trips and this is how we choose to exist together. Is this the best way? Yes, no, maybe, who knows. What matters most is that traveling with them for the better part of three decades has taught me crude lessons about the passage of time.

When I was still in my early twenties, I was self-conscious that strangers would judge me for “still traveling with my parents.” By strangers, I mean peers who would consider me a loser who goes on trips with her “old” parents, rather than a boyfriend or a group of friends.

Lately, however, I noticed a shift in how strangers perceive us. I see that admired look in their eyes as they think, “How nice, that young woman still takes her parents on holiday.”

A similar moment occurred a few months ago when my mom and I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Rome. This was our fourth concert of the Boss. The first time, I was fourteen and we journeyed all the way to Milan.

As we were sitting on the grass in Circo Massimo, the ground was muddy, and my mother was recovering from a broken wrist. She had mobility issues, not being able to use her arm to lift herself up. When the band came on stage, I pulled her up and we were on our feet for the next three hours.

At the end of the concert, a group of women (not much younger than my mom, if you ask me) told her “Congratulations Mrs.!”, implying that at her age it was quite a feat to dance through a Springsteen concert. Then, they turned to me, “It is so wonderful that you take your mother to concerts.”

My mom was humiliated, and I winced. I am sure they meant to pay a compliment, but for her, it was just another reminder that her body bears the brunt of time (by the way, my mother is just about younger than Bruce Springsteen, but it would appear time flows differently for rockstars).

Yet, it is undeniable that the first lesson is a physical one. One of these truths that are so evident, I would need to go out of my way to blind myself to it.

My parents are no longer who they were twenty years ago.

As they age, I fill more and more of the gaps left on their bodies by the passing of time. I take over tasks that, as a kid, were their responsibilities. I lift the carry-on to the airplane overhead and the luggage in the car’s trunk. I run to the closest pharmacy when they are not feeling well. I circle the block when we are lost and need directions.

I don’t mind doing any of this. It comes naturally to me to step in and take charge. And yet, it breaks my heart when my father sees me bearing the weight and murmur, “I am not the same as before, am I?”

During our trips, we end up spending days and days just the three of us. From the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep. It is not always easy. Sometimes, I get so focused on making sure they are comfortable and have everything they need, that I tire myself out.

I think ahead if an activity may prove too tiresome. I make sure the schedule allows for my dad to rest after lunch. I look for options that are not too physically demanding: replacing long walks with bus tours, ensuring the presence of elevators, and planning for bathroom breaks every so often. I make sure these resources are available even if they choose not to use them.

I don’t have kids, and apart from three resilient plants and two vocal cats, I am not responsible for any other living thing. Traveling with my parents has elicited a new sense of responsibility in me.

My mother is a proud woman and would kill me if she read any of this, but this is the reality of things. When we travel, a part of my brain is reserved only for them, and, to me, this must be the meaning of parenthood.

I now realize these trips are gifts. They gift me memories, anecdotes, stories that I will never forget, but most of all, they gift us the time to talk.

Just as I have been more conscious about how we spend our days, I have also tried to be more present in our conversations. It is incredibly easy to speak of nothing, a loose chit-chat to fill the void, and it is just as simple to sit in silence, every person lost in their own thoughts.

But this is not how I want to spend our last conversations. Instead, I grab the opportunities to get to know my parents, every day a little better. I ask them about their childhoods, their struggles growing up, their relationships with their parents, their first jobs and first romances, and still more about why they decided to have kids, what they wish they had done differently, and what they still want to accomplish.

We all risk losing our relationships to the dullness of everyday life but traveling has the power to make each conversation extraordinary if only we invest the time to speak of something meaningful.

But let’s return to that concert for a moment. I downplayed the comment of the group of women and my mother eventually stopped talking about it. On the two-mile walk back to the metro, as we recounted our favorite songs, I was still left with the question: When did we pass the tipping point?

I try to focus my attention and identify the very moment when the narrative shifted from my mom, my parents, taking me places, to me leading them around. Still, I don’t know when it happened.

I guess that a part of it is the simple circle of life. The infamous “time is a wheel” that parents use to tell their kids, “You’ll see. One day, you will be in my position.” The expectation is that when the time comes, we will need to care for our parents like they cared for us in our childhood. We will be judged by the effort, patience, and passion that we put into it. Will they move in with us? Or will we pay for a retiring home? Depending on one’s culture, upbringing, religion, and social stratum, one answer may be more appropriate than another.

But what I want to do is question that very narrative.

My mother has always been the one taking me to concerts, U2, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, the list goes on and on. Now, we still go to concerts together, but I don’t feel like I am the one taking her. The only change I see is that she no longer pays for my ticket. Just as I pay for my trips alongside them.

We journey, we experience together, as peers, equals, friends. And yet, it is undeniable that when I was little and I grew tired in the concert hall, the restaurant, the museum, or the stroller, my parents always took care of me. Now, I watch over them from the corner of my eye. But that is just what comes naturally to me as an adult, no longer a child.

Assuming otherwise would take away her agency, her dignity as a woman who has gotten so far in life, she now has a daughter to rely on. In no scenario should this make her less than what she was before. Some years ago, upper body strength may have been her resource; now, the wonderful relationship she fostered with her grown-up kids is. Time has passed and reshuffled the deck, discarding old cards and drawing new ones, but my parents are still resourceful in travel, just as they are in life.

Wherever this flag’s flown, We take care of our own — Bruce Springsteen