Day 340, Year 7: Cold Feet
Date: Saturday, October 13, 2012
Weather: Partly Sunny and Cool; Temps in the 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
It is getting cooler here in New England, but that is not the cause of my
cold feet. Tonight we had dinner at a friend’s house and when we were
saying our good nights I think it finally dawned on me that we are actually
leaving here in two weeks . . . actually in less than two weeks, and
suddenly, I got cold feet. As we sailed around the world, I always got a
bit ‘musu’ when we stayed in a place long enough to get attached and it was
time to leave. But I’ve never had to sail away leaving grandchildren
behind. I know I’ll be able to do it, and I know that after a week or so
out there, I’ll stop crying, but right now my heart just breaks and the
tears fall when I think about not seeing Sam, Jonah, and Oliver on a regular
basis. Yes, we’ll be back next spring, and yes, they might even come to the
Bahamas to visit in February, but that’s just not the same as watching them
grow day by day. We were home for over four months when Jonah was born
which was certainly long enough to get attached, but we knew we had to leave
to get back to Windbird and complete our circumnavigation. That made things
much easier. This time we don’t have to leave. We are making the choice to
do so and that makes it harder. The cruising life style suits us perfectly.
We love it. But it is not very family friendly unless you have lots of
money to fly home often and fly your children and grandchildren to visit you
often. We don’t have that luxury. As we sailed around the world, I asked
every woman sailor I met if they had children and grandchildren. It was
hard for me from the beginning to be so far away from my adult children.
What I found is that most of the sailing couples we met either had their
young children with them, or were second marriages or couples without
children. Some were like us. They had adult children but no grandchildren
yet. In the case of the second marriages, the men had children by a first
wife, but were sailing around the world with a second wife who had never had
children of her own. And I’ll never forget our friends from Germany who
flew home from New Zealand to see their two year-old twin granddaughters.
The girls had no idea who their grandparents were, and then and there,
Monika insisted that they sail back to the Mediterranean the next season so
they would be closer to the grandchildren. There were other similar
stories, so the power of grandchildren on their grandparents is strong. So
what do we do? We’ve committed to turning Windbird into Snowbird for this
year and we’ll just have to see how it works out. Our plan for the next few
years after the circumnavigation was to continue cruising in the winter
months and return to New England in the summers. But we didn’t have
grandchildren when we made that plan. Things look different here and now.
And since Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco live so far away and in a place where
we can never sail, that presents another problem altogether. How do we find
a way to spend quality time with them? When we return here in the warm
months, Mark works at West Marine and we really can’t travel to visit them.
I think we’ll have a lot of time to think this winter and we’ll just have to
re-examine how we want to spend the next few years.
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| 121013 Day 340 Cape Cod, USA–Saturday Morning with Oliver and Sam |
