When I was a precocious toddler sporting a massive head of black hair in Dallas, Texas, we lived near a little girl who had renamed herself Wonder. My mom could tell you more about our old neighbor (including her given name), as I can only muster the fuzziest of memories. Blonde hair, skinny legs. Maybe she had accrued five or six years of experience to my two? I know I thought the world of her. We moved away when I was three.
Thinking of her now, given the late 70s timing, it seems likely that Wonder was an homage to Wonder Woman. But in my family, she lives on as the girl who wondered, who felt wonder before all this mind-blowing beauty - so much so that it became her name!
I brought that spirit with me and my kids to Costa Rica in May. I found a window between AP tests and fifth grade promotion ceremonies, between the end of finals at Princeton and the start of summer internships, and I took it. We hadn't traveled internationally together since after Mike died, before the pandemic, when we went to an all-inclusive resort. That too was a major adventure for me, recently widowed and desperate enough to avoid the Christmas holiday at home without Mike that I signed on to take my 6, 11, and 14 year old children to Jamaica all by myself in December. I'd never done anything like that before, but the outrageous price tag was well worth it. It was a safe, abundant holiday spent sliding down water slides, licking ice cream cones, and basking in the sun.
But Costa Rica was something else entirely. Now I am a solo mother with an 11, 16, and almost-19 year old. I discovered my children can help me with navigation, managing stressful moments, and decision-making. They can hop out of the car to unlock the sliding gate that let us back into our Airbnb in the dark, laugh their way through class 4 rapids, speak far better Spanish than their mother, run through a Panamanian airport to make it to our connecting flight in time to board and indulge me when I insist they watch the video for Van Halen's 'Panama' on my little phone later on the drive home from BWI's long term parking lot.
And because they are independent, capable young people, I could sit in the shade, digging my toes into the sand and watching three bobbing heads out in the clear blue Caribbean Sea, briefly imagining their conversation before turning back to my book in contentment or following the sounds of howler monkeys to take a peek at them climbing through the trees.
I wondered at the stretches of time when I was not needed. When I was simply being, an animal in a landscape teeming with other animals who made themselves known to me whenever I sat still and waited. How did those novel states of non-vigilance - of embodied affinity with everything alive around me - come to happen exactly? It was mind-blowing.
I wondered at my increasing sense of connection to my children. It was akin to their first days on this earth, when it was as if we inhabited one body, one nervous system, a fluid loop of call-and-response. Hunger, milk; exhaustion, sleep; touch and touch and touch. Except now our boundaries were blurring around our thoughts, emotional responses, stress levels. We picked up and put down conversations, told trip-generated jokes that somehow grew funnier the more times we told them, reacted to heat and hunger with the same brittle irritability.
I kept on messaging my family, closest friends, and boyfriend to share what was happening during the trip because I wanted to. Those people still existed for me. But also, on an inexplicable irrational level, I began to feel that my children were all the community I ever wanted or needed. Sometimes we tease each other about the Brogan mind meld; this was something different, and just mine to experience. As we traveled home and my children began to reach out to their friends, talk about school and graduation parties, and plan their next social days at home, a part of me felt so sad. Reluctant to let go of our enclosed world of four. You guys, let's not go home! Let's stay like this, just a bit longer!
I don't think I've ever felt quite that way before. I love my children and their company, and I'm acutely aware of how important my other relationships are, in and of themselves, as well as in support my parenting. I really love the company of other adults; I really need breaks! And yet. I didn't even want it! It made me remember my dad's palpable grief every time we came home from a big vacation. My sister and I were happy to return to our friends and independent lives; he never wanted the trip to end.
So, yes. I wondered at my big love for my children, and my utter satisfaction in their company.
And finally, because the environment in Costa Rica is so extraordinary, I never took off my amazement goggles. Every time my eyes swept over a new landscape, I was looking for something special, and if I waited a moment, I almost always found it. Wonderful! Look, hummingbirds! Hibiscus! The clouds! A toucan! My eyes were always at the ready, and my hands ready to point out the special thing my eyes had found to my kids.
I had a few experiences of seeing something out of the corner of my eye, getting excited, and reaching for one of their arms to get their attention...only to discover that the fin cresting the surface of the water far on the horizon was a snorkeler's flippers. Near the end of a steamy hike at the base of a volcano named Arenal, during which we had already spied incredible tropical birds, a rodent called an agouti hopping adorably in the forest, and unknown brilliantly-colored lizards, I gasped and grabbed Frances' arm as I heard crunching leaves and caught a flash of color around a bend in the trail. Quiet - there's something there!
I held my breath. My amazement eyes were ablaze in anticipation.
Two hikers emerged through the trees. Oh, I said. Never mind.
But actually, scrap that sheepish let down moment. Always mind. Why not be amazed? Two human beings! In this crazy jungle. Here with us. And the forty other people we've seen on the trail. Wow.
One afternoon, when I saw a little dog picking its way along the far off river bank from our raft, I was already in pointing mode. Because of the rushing water it was hard to hear each other, so I'd extend my arm and point with a flourish to indicate the amazing things I saw, like a heron flapping overhead. It didn't take long for my pointing arm to develop a life of its own. It flew out before I even registered what I was seeing. When it insistently thrust itself towards movement far ahead of us on the bank, within a second it became clear my pointer finger was not targeting a new fuzzy tropical mammal but rather a little black mutt. Someone's pet. Our guide in the back of the boat loudly objected over the roar of the river: that's just a dog!
I felt a little embarrassed. But then I smiled. I was being a baby all over again, pointing at this and that, amazed by garbage trucks and squirrels and other children, insisting on showing them to everyone else. When a baby points at a dog and looks at you with delight, amazement, and expectation of your agreement on the matter, who among us hesitates to offer it? A dog! Yes! There is a dog! Look at that doggie! Hi dog, bye dog! There goes the dog!
Babies see the world with amazement goggles. Or rather, they see the world. Later they learn to put on no-big-deal goggles. Business-as-usual, I-have-important-pressing-things-occupying-my-mind goggles. But it seems to me the beautiful constant impulse in a baby is: oh my goodness what is THAT? THAT is amazing! Let me show it to you! And then, finally, what is its name? Tell me, then we can keeping talking about it and holding it in our minds after it is gone. (Hence my futile flipping around in a Costa Rican bird book, searching for names).
So in that spirit, I dropped my embarrassment in the river and thought: I get to encounter this dog with my Costa Rican baby vision. I get to enjoy this transformation of the mundane into the incredible. That dog is amazing. It is walking around and sniffing and getting its paws wet, being super cute.
Look everyone! A dog!
