At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

by Tsh Oxenreider

I can dispel this myth. I can shout from the rooftops that you can both love to travel and be happily married with children. You don’t have to delay familial commitment out of fear that a ringed finger means no more fun in European bars or on African safaris. Giving birth to new life doesn’t mean the death of your passport; kids are remarkably fantastic travelers and can open more doors to cultural experiences than going solo.

A solid marriage, well-cultured kids, and travel? Hearty ingredients for a fulfilling life.

This book chronicles my experience as a happily married wife and mom in her midthirties who never outgrew her wanderlust.

I wanted to sink into the unpredictability of a cross-cultural life, yes, but I also wanted a bona fide home.

I was infected with an incurable sense of wanderlust, but I was also a homebody.

We may not have soul mates in this life, but most of us have my-God-if-I-don’t-walk-through-the-rest-of-my-life-with-that-person-I’m-an-idiot mates.

Nobody seems to embark on a massive journey because their lives are already full of meaning.

I want to see a thousand tiny places, smell their flowers, and taste the sauces made by their people. I want to feel the difference between the textures of grit in Sri Lanka and Morocco. I want to meet the woman who bakes the best bread in the smallest town in New Zealand. I want to find the best vantage point to see Bosnia from Croatia. What do the Grand Marnier crêpes taste like in Rouen? In Paris? There are untold numbers of tiny places and extraordinary people who occupy them.

this world is huge; it is majestic; it is worth exploring just for the sake of knowing it.

Jet lag is punishment to a body already in culture shock, forcing you to sacrifice desire for the necessary: you may want to find solace from reading a novel in bed, but you’ll regret that decision later at three in the afternoon, when your body taunts your poor choice with shaky legs and heavy eyelids while standing on a crowded metro, strangers’ armpits too near your nose.

Hard doesn’t mean wrong. You’re on the right path.

Never put things down your gullet that could slash it in final vengeance on the way down—this is my gastronomic philosophy.

I love the freedom of nomadic living, too, but yearn for the simplicity of home. I grow restless with the humdrum of small, ordinary life, but know it’s in those hours of sorting socks and vacuuming the car where most of life is meant to be lived. I don’t think I am made to do daily extraordinary things, to constantly unearth new sights. The loveliness of wandering, of travel, dangles like a carrot on a stick, but it’s coupled with the heartache of wanderlust, of knowing that there will always be one more thing to see. Chasing the globe’s rotation for more than a few months will do me in. I will come undone. It is not how I am meant to live; I know it.

For twelve years, we’ve traveled together, worked side by side on business projects, and run a household together. But we are very different people. I like to think of myself as flexible, that I’m good at going where the wind blows, but when I need to adapt to unsavory conditions that test my senses, my body and brain overload. Kyle, however, is the epitome of adaptability. He makes small talk with taxi drivers as they take convoluted routes and tell about their family exploits. He lets people wrangle for priority in front of him as he queues in line, because why fight it—this is simply how it is done in their culture. He deals with a sensory overload of flashing sights, pungent smells, and dissonant sounds because, well, it’s Asia. That’s what one does when traveling in Asia. Kyle is the masterful cross-cultural explorer. He also knows me better than anyone, and knows when I am about to shatter.

I am curious, however, if it’s our long-held familial traditions that make us wax nostalgic, or if it’s our customary calendar rhythms. Do we tend to ache for customs of hot cocoa by the fireplace because we’ve gone through the swelter of summer and the decline of fall? Or does Christmas itself imbue us with sentimentality?

Daintree as a World Heritage Site, verifying John’s assertion. Indeed, the age of the pteridophytes, the age of the conifers and cycads, the age of the angiosperms, the conclusion of Gondwana (the ancient supercontinent before it split into today’s continents), the origin of songbirds, the mixing of continental biota between Australian and Asian plates, the extreme effects of the Pleistocene glacial periods on tropical rain forest vegetation, and the most important living record of the history of marsupials and terrestrial vegetation—all

Sometimes, even when I’m standing on a remarkable slice of terra firma, I’m besotted with wanderlust, my heart thumping for the next unknown place and my mind wondering what’s next.

The curse from this is a growing hole in our hearts because friends are always continents away, no matter our geography. The blessing is, well, friends. Wherever we are.

I cannot push a thumbtack in a map and say, “There. That is where I’m from.” There is nothing to grab onto, no anchor.

Poet Mary Oliver writes, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

There was a global phenomenon an arm’s reach away, and we chose instead to soak in the ordinariness of home, be it a temporary one.

going into the unknown means returning to the known is a bewitching sweetness. Adventure doesn’t always require a sturdy backpack.

“Everybody has a role to play—say no to sugar daddies.”

Outside of the United States, there is nowhere else I feel more at home than Europe. In fact, I often feel more at home in Europe. My favorite day’s agenda anywhere mimics a life in tucked-away European villages—walking to the market for the day’s groceries, sipping coffee that isn’t in a to-go cup, drinking wine with lunch without judgment. Where, for some mystifying reason, food is much kinder to my innards.

Europe is, on the whole, my happy place. If I could afford to, if I had legitimate permission stamped in my passport, and if the people I’d miss most were willing to come along, I would live here. This small slice of land has my heart six ways to Sunday.

If I could, I’d take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization. Expat friends who live throughout Europe have regaled me with stories about their daily life that, were it my home, would indeed cause me to question my loyalty to the continent. Europe isn’t perfect. But she sure is lovely.

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, “Love doesn’t mean gazing at each other, but looking, together, in the same direction.”

The act of travel, the constant moving and shuffling of our bodies and backpacks, our dotted lines across the map, the simplicity of owning less to see more—these small acts are weaving our family’s tapestry.

We are learning presence, how to delight in each other’s mere existence, muster affection in spite of our quirks. As Hemingway says, “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”1

Italians look at everything as art. They’re free to take risks, and they know it will sell because Italians are curious and are usually willing to try something new. For the art of it.”

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

We want to show them the world while they’re young. The earlier they see the world, the more normal it is for them. And the younger they start traveling, the better travelers they become.”

a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.

I want passport stamps, so long as I have a drawer to keep that passport in at the end of a trip.

Author Terry Pratchett wrote, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

The more I travel, the more I’m at peace with the unslakable satisfaction of wanderlust.