Why I’m glad I didn’t have a “normal” childhood

I did not have a “normal” childhood.

I was born to parents who lived in an 11×22 ft. log cabin on the back side of a lake with no road, electricity or running water. My first meat, through a baby food grinder was black bear. My earliest memories are of trapping turtles with my Dad and hunting mushrooms with my Mom.

We skipped school to fish with our dad. My mom taught me to sew, and can everything we could grow. We built two log houses from scratch before I turned 14. I peeled most of the logs for the second one with a draw knife and my bare hands. My brother laid a good portion of the sub-floor of the first with a ball pean hammer and a stick on a chalk line: “Put one nail at either end of that stick,” my Dad told him. And so he did. He was four, almost.

They hauled me (and my brother) out of school two separate years and rolled us around the continent in the back of a van. We climbed pyramids, hunted our own food with spear-guns in the mar Caribe, and frittered away long afternoons in the great big world with few toys, but giant imaginations. This is what happens when you have nomads for parents and a van that your dad names “Vagabunda.” They are the coolest people I know.

You know what’s funny? I was in university before I realized how “weird” all of that was. Of course I knew not everyone did those things, but when you’re a kid, life just is what it is. I didn’t realize that most families don’t eat three meals a day together, that most dads don’t read the entire Mark Twain anthology, or Josephus to their kids to while away long nights when tropical bugs are seeping through the screens. I didn’t know that it was in the least abnormal to have your backpacking parents throw you in a bag and go on a walkabout, towing the glass bottomed sailboat you helped your Dad build in the unfinished upstairs of your house (you know, instead of finishing the house!)

People ask me with fair regularity whether or not I worry about how our kids will turn out, having had such an “unconventional” childhood. Of course I worry about how my kids will turn out! Every mother does! But I don’t worry about the effect of a nomadic childhood on their longterm success or happiness. My brother and I don’t always agree, but we do agree, whole-heartedly, that the best thing our parents did for us was yank us out of school to travel. The outside-the-box childhood that my parents so nonchalantly delivered to my open hands has made all of the difference to me.

If you’re considering taking off for an extended walkabout with your kids and you’re worried about the social and longterm implications for them, may I encourage you to take the plunge? Having been that child, I am confident that they’ll thank you later, even for the things they hate and that go badly. The tough things make us into tough people and the perspective and perseverance that develop as a result are priceless gifts that are hard to develop any other way. I’m so glad that my parents were more concerned with living passion driven lives and fulfilling their dreams, fully including their children, and for our express benefit, than they were with giving me a “normal childhood.”