travel – Birth of Adventure

Birth of Adventure Part One – Discovering Adventure in New Zealand

My friend Christine urged me to take a pregnancy test. We were talking on the phone, me in Wellington, New Zealand, and Christine in her London, UK flat.

My period was late.

“It’s probably the stress of your accident,” she said, “take the test and you’ll know for sure.”

I went out and bought a test and brought it back to my temporary residence. I waited, peering at the stick through the criss-cross bandages engulfing my swollen and purple face. Waiting to see if there would be one pink line meaning not pregnant, or two pink lines, meaning pregnant.

After the accident, my boss kindly put me up in her parent’s vacant home in Wellington until the doctor could sign off on me flying back home to Canada.

I had come to New Zealand for a work conference. I was 27 and had a dream job – an international recruiter based in Toronto with colleagues in London, New Zealand and Australia. My job was to recruit teachers from Canada to fill teaching positions in London during the UK teaching shortage. After teaching in London for 2 years, I loved being able to bring the wonderful experience I’d had to others, and with the job I was able to travel.

Flying all the way from Canada to New Zealand seemed like a once in a lifetime experience so I booked time off to backpack around the country after the conference.

Two weeks before, on what was supposed to be my last day in NZ, I’d popped into the Visitor Center in Queenstown, the “Adventure Capital of the World” looking for an activity to fill my time after the bus back to Wellington had been delayed.

“What is the safest activity?” I’d asked.

Within an hour I was strapped into a tandem hang glider with my instructor.

His partner shoveled snow to form a slope so we could run off the cliff at 25 miles per hour. I felt a sense of invigoration – the urge to feel the wind on my face, excitement about the sights we would see, all of which would be memorialized by the camera attached to the glider on a metal pole.

The beauty of New Zealand had dazzled me right from the beginning from the tiny plane window. The shimmering blue sky that touched the blue of the ocean, swirling white clouds, and the endless green snow-topped mountains. I felt like I was in the Lord of the Rings and would see a hobbit coming around the corner any second. I was mesmerized.

The spectacular views were what spurred me to try hang gliding. I wanted to fly like a bird over the mountains. I’d never done anything like this and I loved the sense of adventure. I also felt incredibly nervous – I was about to jump off a cliff.

The instructor told me we needed to run to get the speed that would help us take flight. I asked him what would happen if we didn’t run fast enough? “Not an option,” he said.

My heart raced as we ran. My feet lifted up. We were still too far from the edge – I tried to force my feet to the earth to gain the traction we needed.

We got to the edge and jumped, and there was a slight lift, then a plummet. White flashed by, snow flew past, then a strange feeling, like my face … crumpled.

The glider stopped. It was hard to open my eyes so I kept them closed. I was dangling in my harness. I heard the instructor swear. After a moment he said “Lie still”.

The details are fuzzy but his partner made his way to where we were, and they unfastened me from the harness, and I lay in the snow on the mountain while they called for help. I asked what happened, and he said we crashed about 50 feet down the mountain. He said my face took the force of impact from the metal camera pole.

A helicopter landed and I was lifted into it and taken to the local hospital. They then airlifted me to another hospital in Dunedin that specialized in facial reconstruction.

It felt serious, but all I could think about was I had been in one hang glider, and two helicopter rides, and I still hadn’t been able to see the view of the breathtaking New Zealand landscape. What a ripoff.

It’s strange what we worry about. I was being taxied to major surgery and I was worried about not seeing the view, and about what people would think. A kind nurse talked with me, and I asked him if he would be mad at his partner for doing something careless like hang gliding. I thought about my parents, and my boyfriend David, and worried if they’d be furious at me for doing this.

I was taken in for xrays and the radiologist asked me if I was pregnant. I shook my head and said “No”.

After looking at the images, they said my nose and left cheekbone had been crushed and would require surgery to pin and repair the bones. There was a deep laceration on my cheek that would be sutured as best as possible, but it wasn’t a clean cut, and parts of the flesh were gone. I asked if I would have a scar, and they just looked at me wordlessly.

I don’t remember the pain at first, I might have been in shock, but after surgery it was brutal. The worst was when they took out the packs of cotton in my nose – they dropped morphine directly into my nostrils as they pulled out the packing – it was worse than anything I’d felt before.

I still hadn’t seen my face and I was afraid to look. When I could get out of bed I walked to the mirror in the bathroom. My face was criss crossed with bandages, my skin different shades of red and purple.

When they later changed the bandages I saw my face clearly for the first time. It no longer looked like the face I knew. The stitches were an angry jagged line across my left cheek from the bottom of my nose to the outside corner of my eye. My broken nose and cheek were puffy and red. The left side of my mouth drooped limply. I crookedly smiled at my reflection, only the right side lifting with the motion. I wondered if it was because of the swelling on the left side.

The nurse saw me looking mournfully at my face.

“You’re very lucky you know”, she said. “The Doctor is the best in the country. You should have seen what you looked like before.”

I probably should have felt lucky, and lucky to be alive, but I didn’t feel lucky at all. I looked like Quasimodo.

The Doctor visited me and asked how I was doing. I asked him about my mouth, why was the left side of my face drooping and would it get better soon?

He said very plainly that it might be permanent.

I stared at him shocked.

He explained that the nerves were likely cut and that it was possible they could regrow but it was also possible they might never recover.

I cried. I had kept myself together so far but imagining I could never smile properly again was too much.

I knew I should feel lucky – I was alive. I hadn’t broken or lost any limbs. The pole had missed my eye, my ear, my teeth. But I’d struggled with body image throughout my life, and finally I’d gained a level of comfort with who I was, and how I looked. My boyfriend David loved my eyes and my smile. My left eye was different now – pulled tautly from the cut. I had an angry scar across my cheek. And I was hearing that at 27 I could go the rest of my life with half of my face paralyzed.

I tried to pull myself together as the doctor watched me silently. He then told me that I was ready to leave the hospital.

I burst into tears again. I had nowhere to go. My family and friends were over 9000 miles away. My boss was in Wellington on the North Island. I was in Dunedin on the South Island over 17 hours away by bus. Weak and concussed, I couldn’t imagine making that journey by myself.

When I told him the situation, he was my hero. Accidents are covered fully by insurance in New Zealand and he arranged for me to stay in a rehab hospital for a week before going back to Wellington.

While there I started to cheer up. My boss sent me a care package with treats and books. The hang gliding company sent me a package with my belongings, my coat, my wallet with passport, and a full refund of the fees I’d paid them. The hospital had volunteers who would visit and spend time with the patients. This was before Facebook and Facetime, but I managed to talk to my family and to my boyfriend David on the phone.

When I described my face to David, he told me I was beautiful no matter what.

I was still foggy and feeling weak, but with help from a colleague in Christchurch and my boss, I made it back to Wellington and moved in temporarily to the beautiful home overlooking the water of Cook’s Strait, with rolling hills and grazing sheep in the distance. I desperately wished I could be home with my family and friends, but being stuck on the other side of the world, it is hard to imagine being given a better place to recover.

Waiting until I was cleared to fly home, I spent the days trying to work in the Wellington office, and the nights by myself, calling loved ones around the world. (And note, I had not yet considered the astronomical cell phone bill I was racking up with a 2002 Canada cell phone plan calling North America and the UK from New Zealand – yikes!).

One night watching the Bridget Jones Diary DVD for the millionth time on my laptop I started realizing my period was late.

It was mid-June. I’d had my last period before David and I had traveled to London and Wales, in late April. Had it been 6 weeks? 7?

Frantically I called Christine and she reassured me that this was to be expected with so much stress. She said I should just go and take a test so I wouldn’t worry about this on top of everything else.

There was no way I could be pregnant. When the radiologist had asked if I was pregnant, I hadn’t even stopped to consider the possibility. But there was a possibility.

I wasn’t ready to be pregnant. I’d only been dating David for six months. He lived in America, I lived in Canada. I had a fulfilling job, I traveled, I was never at home. I’d imagined that one day, maybe at 35 I would have kids, but not now. And I was literally broken, still recovering, still foggy and concussed.

Christine was right, I should get the test so I could rule it out.

And that is why I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, facing out at the bathroom door, staring intently at the pregnancy stick in my hands, swollen face and all.

And as I saw the second pink line forming I felt the dizzying feeling of running off the cliff, not knowing if the glider would catch the wind or plummet down the mountain.

I was pregnant.

Read the next part of this story in Birth of Adventure, Part Two – Choosing Adventure

The Birth of the Birth of Adventure blog

This is the story of how I dreamed the Birth of Adventure blog into reality, its own birth story if you will.

In March 2021, a year after the pandemic first reached our WNY community, my beautiful son Ben turned 18.

Like many parents who celebrate their child’s transition to adulthood, I was in a flurry of emotions. Pride, love, nostalgia. Worrying if I had done enough, taught him enough to send him out into the world. Sweet longing for the days when he was tiny and I was his whole world.

When he was little it felt like time was endless, but now, with highschool graduation looming, I was painfully present to the ticking clock – his time at home with us was slipping away.

For his birthday I wrote him a letter. In the letter, I wrote about his birth story, and about the profound impact he has had on my life. By writing to him, I tried to give him a special gift – a glimpse into the magnitude of love that I feel for him, something that so many children (and adults) can’t fathom – the gift of experiencing how deeply he is loved.

I shared in the letter that Ben tethered me – to him, and to the family we made with his dad and sisters – in a way I had never been tethered before.

In utero we nicknamed Ben “Baby Adventure” (full story in the Baby Adventure blog post), and I spent my pregnancy living in Toronto while Ben’s dad (now my husband David) lived in Hamburg, NY with his two daughters. The adventure continued as Ben and I immigrated to America – right from the hospital, when Ben was one day old.

I went from being an independent world traveler living in the big city of Toronto to a mom, stepmom and wife in America practically overnight. The bigger transition for me, more than moving to a new country, more than giving birth, was surrendering to commitment. As someone who was frequently changing apartments, jobs, relationships, cities and even countries, I was restless. It was a challenge and a joy to learn to stay in one place, raise a family; grow while settling down. As my heart grew bigger than it ever had, I became fiercely devoted to my new family.

And now on Ben’s birthday, I sat wondering, after 18 years of settling down and committing to motherhood, what will become of my life when Ben graduates from high school and moves off on his own adventures?

What surprised me the most was how sad I felt. It was strange because on the surface it is a happy thing. Kids growing up is a natural and vital part of life. And knowing too many people who have lost their children, it’s something I don’t take for granted. Yet this feeling of mourning, of losing, nagged at me.

Ben was going to leave us. But in truth, the goodbyes and endings had been happening for years as our baby and teenagers kept growing.

I’d said goodbye to:

little Ben sneaking into our room in the middle of the night and climbing into our bed.
picking Ben up after his nap, and him falling back asleep, warm and sweaty and snuggly against my chest.
Cozy TV nights with the girls that made way for nights out with their friends.
When Sarah and Hannah graduated from high school, and moved to Syracuse and then Austin, Texas. We still had phone calls and trips throughout the year, but we’d said goodbye to the dream of having them close, of having regular visits or weekly Sunday night dinners.

And soon Ben would graduate from high school and set off on his gap year overseas. Goodbye to Friday pizza and movie nights. Goodbye to his strong bear hugs.

David came with 2 children when I met him, and I couldn’t imagine what our lives would look like without the hugs, chaos, noise, and laughter that kids bring.

I was dreading an empty void where the kids had so vibrantly filled space in my day to day.

As I wrote a mother’s love letter to her child, and shared stories of Ben’s birth and childhood, the moments I’d mourned as lost came alive again. I’d been counting the waning hours on the ticking clock, my head turned backwards, fearing what was coming.

What was I afraid of? Of Ben courageously living his adult life? Or of really looking at my own?

In these years of surrendering to mothering, and to family, although I had a fulfilling career, and volunteered, there were parts of me I’d set aside to make room, lying dormant. My love of travel, of picking up and moving when the whim took me, and setting off for grand adventures. My love of writing, of telling and sharing stories.

A main theme of this blog, a lesson learned from losing my parents and brothers and others too young, is that life is short. Too short to leave passions and dreams dormant. Too short to be looking back with regrets.

I’d been dreading the empty space ahead but what if I looked at it as a precious gift of time waiting for me? After a year of living in isolation, with cancelled plans and disappointments, I needed something to look forward to.

And so I started planning a dream trip, something that I wanted.

I set a date in the not too distant future – spring 2022 – for my dream trip to Scotland. David and I had each visited separately and wanted to go back together. And I’d recently been tracking my family’s ancestry to the small island of Coll – I wanted to see this tiny island with more sheep than people where my ancestors had lived for hundreds of years.

As enthusiasm and energy filled me with something so wonderful to look forward to: the food, the sea, the mountains! (and for Outlander friends, Jamie!), I knew I was ready to start writing again. I wanted to share stories of travel, adventure, family, life and even death. Stories to help and inspire living fully, intentionally and courageously.

I put the Birth of Adventure blog into existence by sharing my goal with friends, and asking my niece Molly to help me with the design and setting up the site.

I would love for these stories to be read, and to be of help to others. But even if not, it will make a difference for me as a creative outlet and way to connect with family and friends worldwide.

And as I mentioned about life being short, I also hope for it to be a historical record of my life on this planet that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren might enjoy.

For Ben, I’m learning that loving and holding tight aren’t the same thing. I’ll miss seeing him every day but I’m proud of who he is and I think the most important thing I can do for him as his mom right now is to help him feel confident and free to pursue his own path. And it helps for him to see me pursuing mine too.

Now off to the next adventure!