Holidays can teach us many things — about a destination, about other people and about ourselves.
When I was a child my parents always said, "Charlotte doesn't like change". Any change of location or routine would bring on anxiety, resistance, potentially a meltdown. To their credit, my parents didn't let this get in the way. Battling their way through my protests, they went on subjecting me to change, mostly in the form of travel. The first school I ever attended was in France; after that I went to one in London. When they could, they loaded the family into an ancient van and drove us on camping trips across Europe, only stopping near Spain when the van's steering failed, we crashed, and my mother's head went through the windscreen.
Change was a constant, so I was a difficult child. I hated elevators, boats, tunnels, Tube trains, flying. I would spend an entire international flight expecting the plane to crash. And yet something must have been altering, as I lived right up at the high point of anxiety. It started to make sense to go forward rather than back, to embrace the thing I hated. If I disliked change it was presumably because I feared it; if travel was what I feared, perversely I would end up with a fascination for it.
In broad terms, I hardened up. Aged 25, I changed everything. I became a mother, left my job as a lawyer, moved to London, had another child. A baby is a huge change, there's no right time for it, no wrong time either. With small children in tow, Paul and I travelled all over Europe, spending our meagre cash on budget airfares and cheap hotels. We had two shabby pushchairs, one for each kid. I remember pushing the strollers around Amsterdam, stopping to breastfeed our 6-week old daughter.
For years we trundled the kids through European cities, and I wrote about it, turning the distances travelled into fiction. Writing in London, I discovered where I really belonged. I dreamed of Tamaki Makaurau, the bush, the sky, the sheen of light over the Hauraki Gulf — and I transported myself home by writing.