home is where you make it

On a road trip through Oman with her toddler son, Ashlea Halpern ponders what it means to be a parent in the wake of her father's death

i was three weeks out from a 23-day travel itinerary with my toddler, Julian, when my dad died suddenly. The trip was something I had planned months earlier, determined to prove to all the face-palming naysayers (and myself) that you don't have to give up traveling after having a baby; you just have to find new ways to move through the world. Due to grief, I considered canceling, but ultimately I decided against it. My father was a textbook agoraphobic who shut himself off from the world and at the end was leaving his house only once or twice a year. But travel was how I learned who I was and who I wanted to be. I'd been to more than 80 countries and spent four years traveling full-time with a 35-liter rucksack and a tiny hatchback. If I could bestow any qualities onto my child, I hoped they'd be my strongest ones: insatiable curiosity, relentless optimism, fiery resilience, and a willingness to bend to my environment rather than expecting my environment to bend to me.