island gypsy is me!

It’s 10:16am. Still in bed. Was reading moving stories on Quora, one of the handful of emails I read frequently to gauge what is happening in the world. Some time ago, want to say two or three years ago (during Covid pandemic) I signed up for “interesting things” forum and it lives up to his name. There are many interesting things going on in the world, some scary ones and some great ones. I like that it reflects the polarity of this world and universe.

I sit contemplating how long is it “normal” to lie here and do nothing, letting the hours pass by.

I’m currently in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic (that’s the location of the picture). I’ve been here for three weeks with one left. The first two weeks my 18-year-old daughter, Isis, was with us. She left and only my 15-year-old son, Jovan, is the only one with me. I have 4 children total. The oldest is 26 years old, Tristan, and he left home long ago. I actually drove him to college in 2014 which was far away from his father and I.

I just parted with my 20-year-old, Josiah, who’s in Florida attending Full Sail University. He was living with me all his life until I left on this trip. My heart broke as I drove from his new place to the hotel we were staying in to fly out the next day. I cried and cried. It feels like a break up when your children leave home. I didn’t plan for him to leave any time soon. It was unexpected. He needs to live and socialize with people his own age, i.e. off-campus student housing.

My daughter just left us but she’s in the next location her brother and I will be at which is with Tristan in Puerto Rico. She too leaves me permanently next January 2023 to go to college in Savannah. Great things await her and her brothers. I call them my 4 little angels.

I’m finally living my dream of being a real-life gypsy exploring the world. No finite destination nor direction. I just picked a starting point and a point after that and I’m taking it from there. It’s the first time I travel without having a home to go back to.

I’ve been traveling in US territory since I was three years old.

My first trip was from the island of Puerto Rico, where I was born, to the state of Massachusetts. I’m not too clear on why my parents chose to go there (they’ve both passed years ago). I think it has to do with my dad enrolling in the army. I was 3 when this happened and I lived there for one year. My parents were kids themselves, my mom was 18 and my dad was 21. It was there that my little brother was born. I remember my mom saying she didn’t want to come back to the island. She really liked it in Massachusetts. So I got the sense that it was my dad who wanted to come back and so it is here where my nomadic life began. We lived in a few different places including my grandmother’s house upon our return. I remember that. At some point between 4 and 5, maybe even 6 years old we moved to a house down the main street, closer to town. Then at 8 years old my mother and father bought a tiny little house much further away from town at a newly built subdivision. The walk must have been at least 1/2 hour to school every day. I have yet to return to the town while it’s awake. It’s only in recent years that I drove by quickly at night.

At 11 years old my parents divorced and at 12 my mom moved me and my siblings (one brother and one sister) to San Jose, California. The year was 1990. They had just had a horrific earthquake the year before of which I had no idea of. I didn’t know anything about California.

I might as well have been moving to Siberia.

I had no idea where I was going, what is it was going to be like, and what kind of life (and oh! how different!) I would go on to have. That is the beginning of my moving a lot and exploring different places. I never realized until now that it was because my parents took big risks as teenage parents to try to live in a different place than they had known all their lives. Plus, the instability that being a teenage parent brought caused them to have to find their place in their little world, with me at first, and with two more children later. They purchased a home at the ages of 23 (mother) and 26 (father). They already had 3 children.

I never put those statistics together before, not even in my head, until now.

My international travels didn’t begin until my mom passed away in 2012. She had just turned 50 the month before and looked 40.

Nothing like the death of a loved one to make you stop putting your dreams on hold. Especially the death of a young loved one. Someone you don’t expect to leave your life so soon. It puts everything into perspective.

I found some notes about my desire to travel as early as 2000 but it was 2012 when I finally decided I would come up with plan to travel. I actually wanted to move out of the country at that time. I divorced that year as well and it’s when the mental planning to move out of the country with my kids began. I got my passport so I could start traveling and exploring.

In 2013 my sister and I traveled internationally for the first time to Panama. Our brother invited himself stating we needed to be watched over. Two grown women with children needed to be watched over. Mind you he’s in the middle as far as order of birth. We usually went along with his quirks and weird rules he set up in his head all by himself. We didn’t object. It came from a good place (I think) and having a man with us was not a bad thing but not my modus operandi.

I don’t live in fear just because I’m a woman.

Since the year 2012 I’ve traveled 9 times to 5 different countries and twice to the US territory I was born in. Panama, Mexico (3 times), Belize, Jamaica, Dominican Republic. Seven of those travels have been to islands: Isla Mujeres, Ambergris Caye, Colon, Frog Beach, and here now in Dominican Republic (1/2 the island), and twice back to Puerto Rico.

As you can already assume, I’m obsessed with islands but I gotta say that after this trip and the next one to Puerto Rico, I might put islands on hold for a while.

Even as I type that, I don’t know how long I’ll stick to it.