Thirty hours without sleep en route to Sweden, and I'm looking up local psychiatric hospitals in case I have a severe mood episode. But nothing comes, other than a troubling temporary sensation that everything in my vision is swaying back and forth, like I'm on a ship. Minus that, I get on a train, I walk to the hotel for twenty minutes with my luggage and toddler in tow, I nap for an hour and a half. And I'm okay, this time.
With this trip, I'm realizing I'm more likely to take the gamble, that I will be okay next time, and the time after that.
Maybe unwise, but I'm willing.
A lot of life seems more worth the pain lately, and not just this trip. I'm not sure when this gradual nudging happened, but I'm realizing the difference now, planning our next trip. I'm able to say that I had a great time overall on our trip to Sweden and Romania, despite challenges (meltdowns) caring for a toddler in another country solo with my husband at his conference for five days. I don't know when I started being able to look at things this way, believing that acting toward my temporary happiness is worth temporary unhappiness.
We attached one of those geo-locators to my daughter's shoe before the trip. A couple times I've run into out-of-town parents whose kids got lost at our local park, which is very large and downtown. At one point, I thought I would need to use the geo-locator, because my daughter slipped out of view. She'd taken another exit from a miniature house in a Swedish playground. I panicked, raced around the house, barely saw her running off.
There she is, I thought. Intense relief.
The aftermath of this trip feels kind of like that, noticing I can feel pleasure and excitement, choosing to gamble, in a way that I can't really remember feeling before. Maybe the way I was supposed to feel as a kid.
I don't know how long this feeling will last, but I want it to last a long time.
Photo: Cosmin Deaconu
We visited Stockholm last year and loved that city and everything Swedish. In the breakfast area in our Stockholm hotel I discovered a delicious caramel cookie called Kolasnittar. Email me, my friend, if you'd like the recipe.