My parents’ photo albums are proof positive that they were never afraid to pack us up and go somewhere.  There I am at about one hanging out in a collapsible crib in some campground.  There’s my brother a few years later in another campground, splashing in a baby tub on top of a picnic table.

National parks… rocky beaches… the backgrounds vary, but the constant in all of those old photos is my mother’s relaxed smile.

As idyllic as those trips all looked through the camera lens, they couldn’t have been remotely relaxing for my mom.  Family lore has it that on a trip to California at the age of one, I ate my way through a borrowed mesh portacrib.  When I was two, my portable potty turned into an emergency bailout device after a sudden rainstorm resulted in a flooded tent.  The following year, my 6 month old brother cried so incessantly in yet another campground that my mother literally kept him latched on all night long to avoid waking any of the people in surrounding tents.

These were the stories and legends of my childhood, the tales that set me and my brother giggling while my mother smiled and rolled her eyes.  It was only after my first exhausting attempts to travel with my own children that I realized just how much work must have gone into making all of those happy memories.

“That,” I told my mom in a phone conversation after we returned from what should have been a simple beach trip, “was the longest week of my life.  How on earth did you schlep us around so much when we were little?  You couldn’t possibly have had much fun!”

My mother laughed.  And then she taught me a little mantra which she had developed and recited endlessly on all those supposedly idyllic vacations of my youth: “a change is as good as a rest.”

That one sentence gave me as much insight into my mother as everything else that I’ve learned from her, and it’s probably the parenting lesson I’ve used the most.  In the years since she first taught it to me, I’ve muttered that mantra countless times as I’ve chosen change over rest in 10 countries and half a dozen states.

Each time, I’ve smiled in secret solidarity with my mother.  And damned if the camera hasn’t captured those smiles in a way that makes me look relaxed, too.

This post is part of our Before We Were Moms Mother’s Day series. Did your mom influence you as a traveler? We’d love to read about it here or at your blog. Please leave your comments and links below.

Read about Jamie’s mom in Opportunity Knocks Down the Door.
Read about Jane’s mom in Diving In.
Read about Sascha’s mom in This Campsite is Juuuust Right.
Read about Kayt’s mom in Just a Little Push.

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