Marriage, Wanderlust and Planning My Escape

It’s late and I’m lying in bed holding the hand of my husband, feeling entombed.

“Do you feel like the walls are closing in around you?” I ask.

“No” he responds and reassuringly squeezes my hand.

Harry, who I’ve been married to for a decade has heard me ask all the variations of this question before…

“Do you feel like you can’t breathe?”

“No.”

“Do you feel like you need to run away?” 

“No.”

One week after our closing in wall conversation I am a castaway, sitting on a pontoon, adrift in the South Pacific Ocean. My eyes are focused resolutely on the horizon, a thin navy strip atop an iridescent turquoise sea. Above the ocean sits an azure sky with wisps of white cloud as though painted by a careless watercolor artist. Around the pontoon is an aquarium filled with parrot fish the size of my feet, exquisitely striped angel fish, tiny sparkling sapphire fish and long, skinny, silver fish with swords for noses.

When I turn my head towards the shore I see volcanic, luminous green mountains rising from the earth. It’s here, bobbing up and down on a pontoon off the coast of the remote Nacula Island that I feel a sense of relief. I can finally breathe.

To get here I rose at 3am, caught a taxi to the airport, a plane to Fiji then a helicopter to the island. As my husband will testify I’ve always been a chaser of grand scale adventures and big moments. I want to live deep like Thoreau and suck the marrow out of life. I want, when it comes time to die, to know I have truly lived. 

When Harry and I met I was nomadic, having just circumnavigated the globe solo, determined to live large. I had my bags stored in a friend’s garage in Southern California whilst I breezed briefly into Sydney. “I’m only here for a short time” I announced on our first date, bidding farewell to Harry a couple of weeks later as I embarked on a new quest. After three months my sister called and begged me to return to Australia and give Harry a chance.

A year after my sister’s phone call, I was married with a newborn. By the time my baby girl was one I had instigated two overseas trips for our new family. I battled with the inertia of motherhood and when my second child was born two years later, I gifted myself a solo trip to the secluded Yasawa islands. When I traveled I found freedom and relief from the vice of daily routine. 

Despite my best efforts and the exhaustion that came with parenthood, I was unable to stay still. I integrated my wanderlust into my children’s lives by placing a large map of the world onto their bedroom wall. In the midst of family life I imagined and engineered trips to faraway places.

Over the ensuing years I coaxed my young children onto planes, ferries, helicopters and seaplanes. I whisked them to tropical islands, desert towns and misty mountains. At bedtime I regaled them with tales from my adventures; of when I lived in the bohemian quarter in Paris, the time I was booted off a train in Budapest, drove through Scotland up to the Isle of Skye, wandered through the markets in Florence, resided in a chateau in the South of France and a tin shed in Tasmania... When I felt squashed by the monotony of sedentary living I relied on my bank of travel memories to keep me afloat.

My husband, by contrast, reveled in domestic life. He always seemed prepared. If we ventured out he was the one with the spare pair of kid’s undies, wipes, hair elastics and an umbrella. He annoyed me by wanting to discuss dinner plans at breakfast. He checked the weather before family walks and washed the sand from the kids’ feet prior to climbing into the car. Harry knew to buy toilet paper before we ran out. Pragmatic in nature he was able to withstand the banalities of the everyday while I did my best to ignore the pull of the Other Life that beckoned me from beyond the front door.

But after a decade of marriage I find myself out to sea staring at the horizon. Like a hypnotized lover I have left my family to feel freedom. 

It’s been a challenging winter where I have nursed my daughter through pneumonia and counseled my husband through a career crisis. I have learnt the Jesus like sacrifice that comes with being a wife and mother. And now I feel hollow, with nothing to give.

In the weeks preceding my escape I am like the victim of an avalanche – alone as my world collapses around me, enclosing my every fiber until I am unable to breathe. How can I keep existing within the confines of family life, of being with these people I love but who require all of me? I think of an adult friend whose mother disappeared in the night, only to return five years later to her children whose hearts still remain fractured. I am not capable of such cruelty and yet this desire to escape is overwhelming.

In the days that follow I am swept up in the raw beauty of the island. At night, lying in my bed the sweet singing of the Fijians floats into my room and I wonder how I can ever return to normalcy and domestic life. Each morning I swim out to the floating pontoon, marveling at the fish and translucency of the cyan sea. Somehow the salt water seeps into my soul and I am strengthened by the volcanic mountains that rise up around me. I am reminded of the scale of things and my tininess in this world.

Slowly I begin to restore. As I sit adrift in the ocean, eyes fixed on the horizon, I begin to see.

Before I met Harry I traveled the world to find love. I purchased an around the world plane ticket and scoured the cities for my soul mate. I endured a plethora of dates in myriad locations - under the Eiffel Tower in Paris, in New York’s Central Park, in a restaurant next to the Opera House in Sydney, and cafes in Canada, Prague and LA.

Always yearning, searching and waiting for my Big Love, I felt sure that when I met ‘The One’ I would feel the lightning bolt of instant recognition. I wanted the cataclysmic, life changing, heart stopping connection.

My first meeting with Harry was friendly, easy and void of earth shattering moments. We joked and conversed like old friends and he accepted my quirks.

Out on the floating pontoon it dawns love isn’t electricity or a golden hued fairy tale ending. Instead, it’s the reassuring squeeze of my hand in the dead of night letting me know that inexplicably, everything will be ok. Love is releasing me into the wild so I can breathe.

My version of the Big Love is my husband sliding a morning cup of tea through the crack in the bathroom door whilst the cacophony of two fighting children rages around him. It’s my small son climbing into my bed at 2am, urging me to take him to the toilet or when he sings loudly as I’m trying to write. It’s my daughter’s face when she tells me a joke. It’s the noise, joy, chaos, crying, laughter, and suffocation of family life.

This is what I searched the world for.

I also see love isn’t about largeness, the relentless chasing of big moments or sucking the marrow out of life. Marriage doesn’t need me to be Thoreau, but rather requires me to bear the grit, intimacy, slog, pain and beauty of the everyday. 

Love is less about pursuing adventure packed months and more about surrendering to the seconds.

I recall when I was a child I loved lying down on the pavement looking at the ants. The closer I looked the more enthralling their busy world became. Tiny ants that could move mountains of sand and dirt and create colonies before my eyes. How miraculous life became when I stopped and took the time to marvel from close range.

I realize family life also needs me to stop and salute life up close, to honor the grand majesty of the minutiae.

After a week, I leave my island refuge and return home. I exit the taxi and unlatch the front gate. My husband has left the porch light on. He rises from bed and helps me lug my bag up the steps and through the front door. I walk into my children’s room and kiss their sleeping heads goodnight.

Harry and I lie in bed holding hands but this time I don’t feel the walls closing in around me.

This time, I turn to him in the darkness and hold on.