Day 273 (March 21): Letting Go of Plan A

Can you tell that we're smiling? We went on a date to a store (Tesco) that resembled Target in its scope.

I'm not very good at adapting. I think I've written before about the fact that when I have a plan in mind, it's very hard for me to let go. Professionally, it's taken me a long time and a lot of effort to learn to understand that my own ideas aren't the only and certainly not necessarily best way to go about something. I wasn't a very good or valuable colleague until I figured that out. The same is basically true for me as a spouse/partner. I have concrete memories of fights from previous relationships that centered on the fact that I believed I had the right to say "no" definitively and end the conversation there. I had a lot of growth ahead of me in those moments.

Approaching this trip, I knew I was going to struggle with this issue. I knew things were going to go wrong or at least awry. I knew that it was my number one goal to demonstrate to my children that I could handle these situations with some grace. Teaching our children how to adapt was one of the most important things we wanted to accomplish on this trip.

Consider this: our "brand" is "Twelve on Six" because we created a plan that would take us to six continents. At one point (the five minutes after I told Elise we could be 12-on-6), we considered going to Antartica so that we could be 12-on-7. At this point in time, though, it looks like it's going to be a misnomer. In fact, it's going to overestimate our travel by 50%! It looks a lot as if we are not going to Africa or Europe.

A rose by any other name would likely smell as sweet and this trip, whether it touches six continents or four, will be extraodinary. This trip, whether we spend nine months abroad or "only" five, will be extraordinary.

And yet, as face some major decisions, it feels - to both of us - as if we're losing something. We picked the timing and route of our travel for several reasons but one of the big ones was that Europe would be the cherry on top. We imagined that, after six months of international travel, we'd be done with our conventional teaching and our kids would be savvy travelers and we'd galavant around Europe with tremendous flexibility. It would be recreational and comparatively fun. We'd be fancy free.

We imagined that before Europe we would go to Africa. There would be natural wonders, to be sure, but more importantly there would be a cultural opportunity that would build on our education in Asia. Given the biases against African Americans in the USA that we are attempting to counter, we'd be able to immerse the children in the richness of African cultures. This would be the apex of understanding that "people are people." Especially as we traveled through the American South last fall, it felt urgent to cover this ground with them. It feels critical to instill in them a firsthand understanding of forces that have shaped their world.

* I'm sorry if that paragraph is clumsy. It's not my habit to write and rewrite these entries. I've done my best to edit those sentences but I'm fatigued.

So, in addition to calculations about health risk and quarantine logistics, we're having to adjust our expectations for the cultural educational value of our adventure. Therefore, when our home government calls for Americans abroad to return home, it feels like going home now would be a huge loss.

I've made mistakes in my life because I was too proud to admit that I was on the wrong path. I'm having to check myself constantly to make sure this is not another instance of that specific error of judgment.

I've also made mistakes - especially in college and grad school - because I tended to over-estimate the significance of a situation or decision. I adopted a mantra, "lower the stakes" to avoid making a mountain out of a mole hill. Now we're facing decisions that might actually be mountains but twenty years of lowering the stakes makes me have the inverse doubt: how should I handle decisions that really are significant.

We sat with the kids yesterday morning to answer their questions about this situation. They've been overhearing many conversations, especially now that we have joined other families here in Malaysia, and Lily especially has a lot of confusion. We talked a lot about knowing there would be many tradeoffs. We talked a lot about how unique this opportunity is. We explained that while we will be able to go to Europe for a week or two, it's going to be a really long time before we have the privilege of months and months to travel and the very unique chance to reside in a place for multiple weeks. It got heavy fast.

One of the interesting questions is about work. If we were to return to the United States now, it's unlikely that Elise would return to work before the kids return to school in the fall but it's likely that I would go back to work sooner than planned. I'm a civil servant and I don't think I could indulge myself with a summer vacation when my colleagues are toiling, especially now that Coronavirus is straining everything that local government has to do.

For a few minutes, our pillow talk turned angry, with our ire directed at this unprecedented pandemic. If we had gone a year earlier, as we had considered, we wouldn't be facing this challenge. If this pandemic hadn't happened just now, we'd be at certain locations, doing certain things, following Plan A. Plan B isn't necessarily inferior (oh, woe is us, spending months in Asia instead of Africa and Europe). The experience we're having isn't inferior on the basis of the goals and objectives that have guided us (education of global citizens, preparation and inspiration for a travel later in life). And, yet, it's still hard to let go of Plan A.

More than anything, especially looking back at what I've written here, I want the kids to have the opportunity experience some places without having school work consuming a significant fraction of their energy and our schedule/logistics. Does this mean we regret taking a conventional homeschooling approach to our worldschooling adventure. I don't. It would be inconsistent with our values to omit traditional education on reading/writing/arithmetic. But all of this inward examination has made us realize that, especially if our remaining time is less than what we planned, it's time for an adjustment.

Okay, enough for now. That's where we are, at least for today.

The kids spent hours at doing art in the kitchen. Especially Henry, who spent 2-3 hours following a step-by step tutorial to draw an action figure.