Disconnected

I've been feeling very detached lately.  The world around me bustles and is on the move, but I'm choosing to sit on the sidelines and just watch.  Does it take too much energy to participate?  Do I just not want to participate?  Is something else going on?  I'm not quite sure what it is. 

I was a little bit wistful today.  I was reading a travel book for the Dewey project, and I kind of regret that I didn't travel more before Julia.  Oh, believe me, I've traveled.  I traveled a lot with my mother.  But I never traveled that much with my husband.  Aside from our honeymoon, we've only gone to forced family events.  Back in college, we did go over the border to Canada once, but I don't think that really counts. 

Traveling with my mother is epic hell.  She is moody as all get out, and if she's in a bad mood, you pay.  All. Day. Long.  She's one of those types that wants to be out the door at 6AM every morning and has an itinerary of 5 things to see, and you cannot stop to even pee.  Seriously, she will not stop if you have to go to the bathroom.  She will only stop if it's on the itinerary.  Lest you think you're held to an impossibly high standard of peeing twice a day, my mother gets motion sick and can throw up while driving.  She won't even stop the car to throw up.  Bodily functions will not throw the lieutenant colonel off the mission. 

Needless to say, traveling with her was a bit ... ugh, rigid.  And while I can be rigid in some respects, I'm the anti-rigid in others.  I would happily get up at noon on my own, take long walks through countryside, eat whenever I felt like it, and if I wanted to spend an hour more than planned somewhere, I'd do it.  My mom and I really don't travel well together, and I guess I started generalizing that traveling was awful instead of traveling with her is awful. 

And now we kind of got ourselves into a corner, being that Julia will be living in the house for another 16+ (let's hope it's just 16) years.  No long, fancy vacations for us.  Sure, at some point she'll be easier to travel with - you know, when we don't have to haul around car seats and strollers.  But still, it's not like you can take her to Paris and go out for a night on the town and leave the 2 year old in the hotel room. 

Perhaps we should have taken one or two big overseas vacations back when we had the time and opportunity.  At this rate, the next time we'll have to opportunity to do it is when one or both of us uses a walker and has dentures.  I guess that means backpacking in Europe will be out.