At 25, I bought a one-way ticket to Johannesburg in the months after Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town was published. My hazy goal was to re-create his overland journey across Africa, except I’d do it from Cape Town to Cairo. My desire was to crisscross Southern and East Africa and head north with just a backpack and a tent. I didn’t have a map or a specific plan. There were only flip phones at that time, so there would be no way to tell if I was lost or off track. My only desire was to wander with no sense of when I’d arrive or what route I’d take to get there.
Back then, many of my idols were wanderers. But the one thing they all had in common was that they were white men. Bruce Chatwin. Jack Kerouac. Ernest Hemingway. And of course Theroux. They never had to explain their decision to go on the road or off the map. They just did it. They didn’t worry about being judged, persecuted, or, worse, raped or killed.
The message I was bombarded with in my 20s was that wandering was for men; destinations were for women. Destinations have expectations written all over them. They’re about timelines. When will I arrive? What will I desire when I get there? But I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t know who or what I would be on the other side. I wanted to go to a place where I wasn’t time bound. What I didn’t understand back then, although I felt its dark tentacles, is that a woman is always on the clock.
Capitalism is at least partly to blame. We’ve all learned to see ourselves as cogs in a much larger machine, bowing down to the twin ideals of busyness and optimization. Yet a woman’s clock and a man’s clock are different animals. A man’s clock is external. A woman’s clock, we’re told, is internal. And like her supposed unique ability to nurture the young and sick, our clocks are considered an instinct: primal, biological, natural. In 1978, The Washington Post declared on its front page: “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,” instilling an existential dread in generations of women to come. Women who wandered had always been seen as suspect. If women’s nature was all about hearth and home, those women, like me, who wanted none of it, were seen as misfits, outcasts, abnormal.
Which, in my early-to-mid-20s, was fine by me. I relished the idea that I was different, special. I thought I’d figured something out that no one else had realized yet: that the only way to win at the game of life was to opt out altogether. The normal milestones of a mortgage, marriage, and motherhood were rigged in my mind. They were for the unimaginative. The straight-and-narrows. The women with polished manicures and the men in boat shoes with sweaters draped over their shoulders. I’ll never be like them, I told myself. I’ll keep moving, spending one week in Nairobi and the next in Kampala.
So I crossed the border between Tanzania and Malawi on foot. Hitchhiked with a truck driver from South Africa to Botswana. Got stuck on a wooden sailboat in a storm off the coast of Mozambique. I loved that version of myself. The one where I answered to no one and only heard my own deepest desires. The one where I tuned out the expectations and rigid rules megaphoned to me by the white-noise machine of a patriarchy that made all biologically female women believe that motherhood was the only finish line. If we got off track, zigged when we should have zagged, we’d lose out on the only thing we’d been promised would give our lives meaning.
Until, suddenly, I closed in on my mid-20s, and my friends—tens of thousands of miles away—reported that they were starting to get married, have babies, climb ladders I’d dismissed as beige and boring. As I sat in the dark and dusty internet cafés where I periodically checked my email, I saw how all of the milestones I’d believed were dull and dreary everyone else seemed to hold up as the destination du jour. I had been told the world was my oyster and taken that to mean that settling down before I’d figured out my own life was retrograde. I’d be letting down my foremothers and the feminist movement. That didn’t seem to be the consensus among my friends, though.
When I finally did give up the dream of landing in Cairo, it was only because my sister offered me one month rent-free in her apartment in New York City. I was 27, and I told myself New York City was a place full of transplants, hustlers, and urban explorers. I got a job at a boutique in Park Slope, Brooklyn, interned for a filmmaker, and wrote in my slivers of free time. I could discard my backpack and my tent in a hidden corner of my tiny closet, I reasoned, but I wouldn’t have to abandon my wanderlust. The image in my mind just changed—from the rugged rule-breaker on the road to the flaneur, the person with the time to amble around the city at leisure. The word flaneur actually comes from the Old Norse flâner, “to wander with no purpose.”
By the time I hit my early 30s, whatever messaging I’d absorbed about independence and freedom had been replaced by a persistent hum: Quick, find a husband, have a baby, settle down, time is running out. And by that point I was in love with a man who adamantly didn’t want children—and I, well, now I wasn’t sure. As I crept further into my 30s, I began asking myself: What if I do want to have a baby someday? What if I eventually don’t want to wander as much as I once did? So I froze my eggs, kicking the can of indecision to Future Ruthie, who I hoped would be better able to answer the question: Can I wander and be a mother too?
By then I’d tied the knot with the man who swore he’d never have babies—the man who had wandered by my side for five years. Once I realized I did want a child, I found myself waiting for him to change his mind about never wanting to be a father. To paraphrase Wendy Wasserstein in The Heidi Chronicles: I found myself waiting for him to let me have it all.
We stalled for two more years, and then he made the decision for me, voicing the words I couldn’t bring myself to utter: We should get divorced. I cried. I begged him to stay. I told him I’d give up on the idea of having a baby.
Mercifully, he refused.
Now, at 46, I have a three-year-old daughter, a new husband, and a mortgage. And just like wandering is a radical act for a woman—motherhood, especially later in life, can be radical too. I know myself better than I did at 25 or 35, so I’m able to hold what society tells me are two incompatible realities in my mind at once: my daughter’s identity and my own. I’m old enough to ignore those who act like motherhood is a terminus. And I have enough financial independence that I can give my daughter many of the things I wouldn’t have been able to if I’d had her younger.
I look back on those days of wandering as the gift they were. But having a baby at 43 comes with its own hardships too. I spent years and buckets of money trying to get pregnant, and once my daughter was born, there wasn’t any room for wandering. There were bills to pay, diapers to change, people who needed me. If a mother can’t wander, a breastfeeding mother is literally anchored in place. She can only walk as far as her breast pump’s cord will allow her. Or her child’s cries. For a while I only wandered in my mind.
But now that my daughter is a bit older, I have my eyes on the road again. I’m starting to dream about the trips we’ll take as a family. And I can see that there are so many ways to be brave, so many ways to follow our own path. She is reminding me of the beauty of slowing down, being idle, dillydallying. And I hope to teach her that she can truly go anywhere, and be anything, on her own sweet time. She doesn’t have to stick to a map. Or a plan. There are no timetables or clocks. Her compass is her own. She doesn’t have to follow in Paul Theroux’s—or anybody else’s—footsteps.