Follow Travel Dreams or Listen to Your Biological Clock? Choices…

“Shut up, biological clock, SHUT UP!!!”

This was my Twitter “tweet” which earned me the most re-tweets in a twenty-four hour span this month of any tweet I wrote. It seems people can relate!

“When you have children,” beamed the husband of one of my generous Spanish hosts, “it is amazing. You suddenly understand the full meanings of words such as “Love” and “Sacrifice” and “Responsibility” that you never fully got before.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but when you’re a single woman in your late twenties, you may be rather excited to get to that stage of life, but you can’t just LEAP into it without considering your life partner carefully, or your life in general!”

“If you believe in fate as I do,” said my host’s husband, “it’s quite relaxing. All you have to do is wait, and it all will come to you.”

But try as one might to breathe deeply and wait for fate, some of the time it is not relaxing at all. You ogle chubby infants on the subway until their mothers run away. Your heart randomly races with panic that you’re wasting precious ovum shelf-life time. You read into innocent things people say to mean: “Your life choices are ruining your opportunities to find love and a stable future!”

Yet there’s not much you can do but keep dating, keep looking, and keep living– without being too desperate, of course.

“Do NOT have kids!” sighed an utterly frazzled Spanish friend as she piled her screaming children into the car. “It’s so good that you’re single and traveling around, untethered!”

And this brings us to the Ghanaian saying I keep thinking about: “Want want, no get. Get get, no want.”

Or my friend Maria’s take on it: “Want want no get, then get… then remember all things about wanting what you had before.”

Full disclosure: this quote came from a G-Chat conversation we had as Maria calmed me down from a raging freak-out that I was living my life wrong and positively murdering my chances for successful life-partner-finding by doing this whole endless travel thing… especially since I’m considering extending the travels for a second year.

Maria soothed my tizzy by revealing her own experience. “I literally spent the years between 25 and 30 NOT traveling because I thought I should be looking for a husband,” she typed. “And of course, didn’t find one then… and I didn’t travel either. So, there we are. Now I’m 32 and in a good relationship… and thus now I’m bound to Boston.”

She concluded, making me smile from my head to my toes: “Long story short, don’t worry about your uterus. Do what you love and the rest will find you. That is my fortune cookie advice for the day.”

Wise, wise words, Maria! All in good time. Let’s embrace the world in all its present glory and enjoy what’s right here, right now.

Photo Note: All the pretty pictures in this article were taken in Madrid, Spain.

2013 and 2016 update: Pregnancy and new mom life!