Giving Birth

I don't have any kids, at least not any that required me to give birth. I have an entire school of kids for 10 months every year and I have a niece and a nephew (see photo) for always. That's good enough for me. I know that there are women that don't get that. I know that not having an intense burning desire to carry, deliver, and mother my very own children isn't something that most people understand. Add it to all of the other reasons that make me a square peg.

 It's fine. I embrace it.

For me, spending a month in a foreign country every year is my very own version of giving birth. 

I suppose that that thought was originally planted in my head after my first trip abroad in the summer of 2012. I remember being in Colombia after 6 weeks away from everything that I had ever known and desperately wanting to go home. I was deep in the Andes debriefing my experience and I thought, “This is probably going to be a once in a lifetime experience. I'll probably never do this again.”

Then the next summer after I came back from Israel (round 1) I swore I would never go back. In fact, I remember walking the streets of Jerusalem for two straight days and thinking, “Soak all of this in. You'll never be back.”

I spent the summer of 2015 walking those same streets.

Today, I leave for Kenya for the second time in three years. And yes, the pattern is the same for my Kenyan experience. I thought I would never go back.  Yet, I'm 45 minutes from putting my backpack in a car and heading to the airport.

When I think back to all of my summers for the past 4 years I keep replaying my sister's voice in my head after she gave birth to my niece. I remember sitting in her living room with her first tiny offspring in her hands, just a few days old, and listening to her tell me that she was glad that she didn't have to make any decisions on future children in that moment. She said that if women had to decide about getting pregnant again just after they just had a child, that no one would have more than one kid in their family. The pain is too great to conceive of willingly giving birth a second time. But then, time passes, the memory of the pain dissipates, and the beauty of the life that was birthed is so great that it makes you want another one.

That's why I have a nephew, I guess.

I feel like that after every trip. I feel like I'll never do it again. There are so many parts that are too difficult to conceive of wanting to do a second time. Specifically, the thought of returning to the same country is unthinkable, especially at the tail end of a trip. And yet, here I am, going back to Kenya in a matter of hours.

It's giving birth.

The product of traveling to a new country for a month creates a different version of myself, one that is born from this new experience. I have to strip myself of all of the comforts and amenities of my daily life, lose the routine that the hold so sacred, and figure out who I am all over again.

It's painful. It's hard.

It changes me. It makes me new.

It breaks me. It rebuilds me.

Every year I think that i'll never go back, at least not to the same country that I just left. But enough time passes, enough space elapses between the old me and the new me for me to see the value in repeating the experience.

So I go. Again and again - to the point that I don't know who I would be without the losing and the finding of myself over the past 4, going to be 5 summers.

I guess that makes me about 8 months pregnant right now. Late in the last trimester, ready for a month of labor.

Ready to break the old me and reform the new one.

I won't know what she looks like for a couple of months, because it takes some time for her to grow. But I know she'll be a better version of anything I've known so far. A better version for the world, for my friends, for my neighborhood, for my students, for my family, and for myself.

So I go.