Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  DEDICATION

  For our own mothers, and for all mothers

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Claire’s Pack List

  Mia’s Pack List

  Introduction

  PART ONE: HUNTING

  1. The Big Bang

  2. China: The Bitch and the Boss

  3. Malaysia: Wallet for Elephants

  4. Nepal: Kaleidoscope

  5. Cairo: Never Ride a One-Humped Camel

  6. Greece and the Balkans: Weight, Weight, Don’t Tell Me!

  PART TWO: GATHERING

  7. Avignon: French Lessons

  8. Avignon: We Are Living Like This!

  9. Avignon: Pentimento

  10. Avignon: Those Who Matter Don’t Mind

  11. Avignon: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

  12. Budapest: Dark Shadows

  13. Avignon: Always Coming of Age

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Also by Claire and Mia Fontaine

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Footnotes

  CLAIRE’S PACK LIST

  Passport with extra photos

  Visas and immunization records

  Travel insurance, important numbers

  Video camera, camera, tape recorder

  Batteries, cords, adapters, converter

  Flashlight, pens, notebooks

  International cell phone, language translator

  $800 cash (50 singles), credit cards

  Emergency contact info, freq flyer #s

  Money belt, empty tote

  Light jacket and pocket poncho

  2 capris, 1 pair shorts

  3 pants, 1 nice

  7 tops: 2 long sleeve, 3 tees, 2 tanks

  1 long skirt for Muslim countries

  Cardigan

  1 scarf and 1 pashmina

  2 shoes: walking, sandal

  Undies, bras, jammies

  Swimsuit, sarong, flip-flops

  Makeup and toiletries

  Eye mask and earplugs

  Travel towel, duct tape, sewing kit

  Portable laundry line, Woolite packets

  Tamiflu, antimalarial, chlorine tabs

  First-aid kit, sanitizer

  Antidiarrheal, Dramamine, aspirin

  Medication, extra glasses and contacts

  Sunglasses, sunblock (SPF 50)

  Bug spray—30% DEET

  Vitamins, PowerBars

  MIA’S PACK LIST

  Passport

  Visa

  Mother

  INTRODUCTION

  One word, Mia—schistosomiasis.”

  An occupational hazard of writing is research; you look up the risk of eating sushi and five hours later you’re an expert on the Loa loa eyeworm and the E. japonica flatworms that are teeming in rivers like the one my grown daughter, my only child, wants to plunge into today.

  I’m holding the bathroom stall door closed for Mia at Kuala Gandah, an elephant rescue sanctuary located in the rain forest of Malaysia’s Pahang region, where we’ve come to ride the elephants and learn about their rescue program. They allow a handful of visitors to ride the big gals into the muddy river and cavort with them as their handlers scrub them down. My devil-may-care daughter is among the select.

  Look, I’m a big risk-taker, an intrepid traveler, but I stop at taking home larvae as souvenirs.

  “You don’t even have to swallow it,” I whisper loudly, “they bore right through your skin and make a beeline for your liver.”

  She comes out, rolling her eyes. “There are fifty other travelers here, Mother. Do you see anyone else worried about it? By the way, these are probably the only sit-down flush toilets we’ll see all day, I’d try to go if I were you.”

  “No one who gets it worried about it before they got it! It lives in rivers in the tropics. That,” I point emphatically out the window, “is a river, and this is the tropics. What are you not getting here?”

  “Mom, if you’re going to be like this the whole trip, the only pain I’ll have in my butt won’t be from traveler’s diarrhea. You don’t avoid London because people get hit by buses! How many opportunities will I get to swim with elephants?!”

  I follow her out of the welcome center to a clearing in the jungle where a group of people, mostly stout, sturdy Brits, are wandering down a dirt trail through the dense flora toward the elephant area.

  She hurries ahead to catch up, with me in tow trying to figure out a way to do what every mother of an adult daughter does when left with no recourse—bribe, threaten, or frighten.

  “Exactly thirteen-point-nine percent of the field police officers of this country have tested positive for it!” I call out after her.

  The Brits turn to look at me, not sure if they should be worried about the Malaysian police force or me.

  Mia gives me a surprised look. “How the hell did you remember that?”

  Given my lack of sleep and estrogen, it is impressive. “Actually, I have no idea why that stuck, but it’s true. And don’t swear.”

  She just shakes her head and scoots around the bend so she doesn’t miss her “opportunity.” I personally know people who struggle with parasites decades after trips to places like this. But she’s twenty-five; I can’t stop her. Once upon a time, when she was under eighteen, I had options.

  My mom’s hardly one to talk about parasites. The first thing she did when we arrived in China was drink three glasses of water—from the tap. It’s not every day one gets to swim with elephants. In all fairness, however, I should probably add that her being overprotective doesn’t exactly come from out of the blue.

  Part I

  HUNTING

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Big Bang

  I was on my way home from work when I got the call. The one that would make me quit my job, sublet my apartment, and take off for the great unknown alongside my mother. The call that led to the book you’re now reading, an around-the-world adventure that’s intended to entertain, educate, and, above all, explore the changing dynamic between mother and adult daughter.

  But before you pack your three-ounce liquids, buy a trashy magazine you’d never otherwise read, and settle in for a cross-continental flight, allow me to hit the pause button. This isn’t the first journey my mom and I have taken together, and you might need some background information so that, for example, if I refer to spending some of my teenage years locked up in the Czech Republic, it won’t come from left field.

  If you’ve read our 2006 memoir, Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey Through Hell and Back, this will be a brief refresher, and if you haven’t, well, you may want that $10 cocktail because it gets a bit intense. Come Back was like a darker version of The Runaway Bunny; baby bunny hops away from home, mama rabbit follows in “dogged” pursuit until her runaway offspring’s back home for good.

  I wasn’t a baby so much as I was an extremely self-destructive teenager, and my mother’s version of dogged involved putting her little bunny in a lockdown boot-camp school for nearly two years. In the Czech Republic. In a place where (for the first several months) you ate food with no condiments, bid shaving and makeup adieu, communicated with the outside world solely through letters to your parents, and spoke only during group therapy or to ask questions in class. And when the school in the Czech Republic closed, I was se
nt to a similar facility in Montana, a part of the world where “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” was then a hit song.

  Granted, my behavior warranted it: dropping out of high school, repeatedly running away, heavily abusing hard drugs, felony drug charges. My relationship with my mom had shattered, we alternated between not speaking and big fights, and by my last disappearance we were completely estranged. She tried everything she knew of: traditional therapy, the psych ward, an alternative school, my aunt’s house in rural Indiana (thinking cows and fresh air would be more wholesome than L.A. was erroneous; in small towns, there’s often the 4-H and the other H, heroin). Hearing about the school in the Czech Republic was a miracle to her. Everyone, of course, thought she was crazy, but my grandmother is from that region, so it wasn’t quite so alien, it was pre-euro and therefore a fraction of the cost of stateside treatment programs, and, mainly, she’d have sent me to Mars if she thought it’d help me.

  No sane teen would trade driver’s ed or prom for draconian rules and confrontational therapy, but, considering how many people I knew who ended up dead or in prison, I’m glad she did because the school saved my life. My behavior stemmed from being sexually abused by my biological father when I was a small child (anyone who thinks small kids will “forget” about abuse sorely underestimates how durable a trauma it is), and over the course of my time there I healed from it, and became accountable for the role I played in my self-destruction. I also reconnected with my mom and my stepfather, Paul, whom I now consider and call Dad.

  It was February 2000 and I was seventeen when I came back home from Montana and started community college. There was a learning curve; while I was gone, something called e-mail and the Internet had exploded, Bill Clinton’s name had become synonymous with cigars and a blue dress, adults had become obsessed with some children’s book about wizards, and white rap had advanced from Vanilla Ice to Eminem. I couldn’t reminisce about first dates or prom with my peers, I dressed like a lumberjack, and ninth grade was the last time I’d actually paid attention in class.

  But I threw myself into my schoolwork, and thanks to a 4.0 GPA and a rather unique college essay, Georgetown University offered me a partial scholarship. I transferred there my sophomore year and spent the next three years pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t still high—I had phenomenal teachers and classes, interned at the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic, and made lifelong friends.

  I was a senior when my mom and I decided to tell our story, something that, because my mom was a screenwriter, we’d been encouraged to do. I was scared to share my life’s nitty-gritty details, but I also wanted to help break the silence surrounding incest and let people who are struggling see that change is always possible. When you’re at rock bottom it can be hard to see past it, and if you can’t imagine feeling or acting differently than you currently do, what’s your incentive to change?

  So while my friends were off finding first jobs and apartments, I turned down a job offer at National Geographic to sequester myself in a room with my mother and a computer. A year and a half later, Come Back was released and met with enough success that we spent an additional few years speaking about and promoting it. In person and via e-mail, we connected intimately with thousands of people, and, to my total surprise, I loved public speaking. My mom and I both were continuously inspired by the work that dedicated individuals and organizations were doing to prevent and treat child abuse. It was an amazingly fun and rewarding experience.

  It also came with unique challenges, and once publicity died down, I felt lost. I’d been living in the past for a living—and a radically different past at that. At twenty-four, I was more comfortable speaking to hundreds of people about drug and sexual abuse than mingling with other young professionals during happy hour. I loved every element of being an author, but I was also beginning to wish my sole identity wasn’t as recovery’s poster child. I wanted to be just a regular twentysomething.

  Few places allow you to reinvent yourself so easily as New York, and in April 2006 I moved to the Upper West Side and dove into city life. A day in Manhattan will leave you feeling either invigorated or like a drowned rat; like a high-strung and intelligent dog, if you don’t take charge New York will end up walking you. But for a curious person with a short attention span, its endless supply of restaurants, museums, parades, and parties made me feel like a kid in the ultimate candy store.

  It took a few weeks to decode Craigslist’s rental euphemisms: cozy = expect to live in a closet; character = you may eat, sleep, and bathe in the same room; bustling neighborhood = you’ll hear the noise level through earplugs. So where am I currently living? In a cozy room in a bustling Brooklyn neighborhood and a building with more character than Dame Edna. Buildings don’t typically have facial expressions, but the bricks in the center sag so much that from across the street my building appears to be smiling. And because it’s above a popular local bar, weekends mean pushing through a drunken mob, explaining to them yes, I live here and no, you can’t use the bathroom.

  Basically, it’s your quintessential first apartment (and the $750 a month price tag was too good to pass up).

  Like most first apartments, I share it with roommates whom, thankfully, I adore: Guenn, a spunky blonde who bakes sugar-free cookies for her grandmother and zips around town on a Vespa, and Alanna, a redhead who looks and acts as though she stepped daintily from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Plus the cozy room overlooks a beautiful courtyard and a bustling neighborhood means everything I need or want is within walking distance.

  I work as a literary publicist in Union Square, an area known for outdoor markets, rallies and protests, a great dog park, and a fleet of leggy models. There’s even a modeling agency on the same floor I work on, so my five-foot-three self often rides the elevator sandwiched between two women whose chests are level with my head, one breast on each side of me like earmuffs.

  I often commute home from work with Soraya, a close friend from college who lives three blocks away. I noticed her in my senior writing class because she was unusually poised and mature, not to mention physically striking, with delicate features, high cheekbones, and beautiful Persian coloring. Once she started talking about Adam Gopnik and growing up reading issues of The New Yorker lying around her grandmother’s house, however, I knew I’d found a lifelong friend.

  Soraya’s one of several college friends of mine who now live in Manhattan, and while they entered the workforce two years earlier than I did, we all seem to be on the same page with our ambivalence toward the adult world. Your first period may unequivocally announce puberty, but your first 9–5 doesn’t definitively mean you’ve grown up. Just last week I passed a group of college girls and was taken aback, saddened even, to realize that I didn’t relate to them anymore. But nor do I feel like I fit into the world of my older colleagues.

  Some of our ambivalence is probably just disappointment; adulthood’s no more or less fun than college, but the levels of stress and responsibility skyrocket. And my weight seems to have done the same since my metabolism came to a grinding halt about a year ago. The only thing decreasing in size is my bank account; after taxes, my boss’s caffè latte costs about what I make per hour.

  Angst about adulthood aside, however, I’m having a lot of fun and am generally happy. But there’s one thing missing, and it’s a big one: my mother. Sure, we wrote a book together, talk often on the phone, and see each other regularly for speaking engagements. But much as working together has brought us closer, it’s also driven us apart, creating a disconnect because it deals with who we were rather than who we are. Some days I’m not sure she really knows me, or at least the “me” I am now. Ever since I moved to New York and she moved to Florida a few years ago (completely out of the blue, mind you), we’ve been wrapped up in our individual lives.

  Lately I’ve found myself letting her calls go to voice mail, because if they’re not about work, they’re filled with unsolicited advice. Now that I no longer have a lunchbox
to leave notes in, she uses my inbox, sending e-mails with subjects like “Link Found Between Stress Levels and Belly Fat,” “Six Subtle Career Moves That Hold Women Back,” and “Cell Phones May Cause Salivary Gland Tumors!” Then she’ll send me Frédéric Fekkai samples from Sephora, “because the ends of your hair are like straw.”

  I don’t know if she’s bored in Florida without her old friends and colleagues, or if it’s turning fifty and this is motherhood’s last gasp, but something’s up with my mom and I wish I knew what it was.

  Mom,” Mia asked halfway through a recent call, “is this how you pictured your life would be when you’re fifty?”

  I opened my mouth to rattle off a packaged answer, but nothing came out. It was one of those defining moments (nothing coming out of my mouth is always a big moment, if not for me, for someone).

  “This isn’t going to sound very good,” I said after a moment, “but I’ve never actually had a concrete vision of my life at fifty.”

  “Well, what do you want to be doing with your life now?”

  That answer wasn’t any better. “Not what I’m doing right now.”

  That call prompted a solitary trip to the beach at sunrise the next morning. I sat in the sand, my brain still lit up with all the mind chatter that accompanies my waking and tends to hang around most of the day. I wanted to contemplate my life, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  “Sit up, old girl, and focus on your breath.” (My inner instructress has always been veddy English, probably because deep inside I’m far more Victorian than New Age. I hear a brass gong in a dim yoga studio and wish not for surrender but for a butler.)

  The horizon yawned up the sun and I watched its yellow arms stretch across the sea, frosting the waves and warming my face. I opened a book I grabbed randomly from my bookshelf on the way out, Eckhart Tolle’s Silence Speaks. My eyes fell on this paragraph: “To lose your inner stillness is to lose touch with yourself. To lose touch with yourself is to lose yourself in the world.”