When my daughter went overseas on her gap-year adventure, my son and I found ourselves alone at home with the cat. Except for the odd Sunday morning at a local junk market and dinners with friends, we spent much of our time in separate rooms, coming together late in the day to eat dinner and maybe watch an episode of something, if we can agree. I know it’s natural for teenagers to spend more time sequestered away in their bedrooms, but sometimes I find myself trying to think up ways to lure him out.
As a single parent, much of our household communication involves me reminding him to clean his room or eat his vegetables or do his homework. Little time is spent on the fun stuff, like the random holidays we used to take. The rough and ready camping trips with a tent that slept all of us, road trips in the Subaru, hoping we wouldn’t break down, or a weekend stay in a dingy motel in a country town.
The destination was never that important. It was more about the local bakeries we passed along the way, the op shops we’d trawl through in regional towns, and the all-important music playlist that seemed to determine the success of the trip.
We don’t have many spontaneous holidays any more, so prompted by my daughter’s tales of backpacking adventures and my desire to hang out with my youngest outside the house, I impulsively booked two tickets to Tokyo for the September school holidays, surprising us both. I knew that my son wanted to return to Japan since we visited as a family when he was eight, and I was desperate for a moment of adventure with him before he left home too. And so, with rashly packed luggage and a basic itinerary built around some last-minute Google searches, we headed to the airport.
We arrived in Tokyo sleepy and excited at 5.30am. Despite the early start, the air was already hot and soupy, which my son used as an excuse to head straight for a vending machine and buy one of the many drinks he’d remembered from all those years before.
There is something very freeing about arriving in a place where you have no plans. And we didn’t. We just walked for hours every day, stopping when we were hungry, wandering back streets, visiting suburbs we remembered and some we didn’t, sharing more space than we’d shared since he was very little. I discovered that he could find his way by remembering landmarks. Within a day he’d become the navigator, and I was the lost one, trailing behind.
Neither of us speak Japanese, so if we wanted to talk, then we only had each other. As tourists, we experienced everything together, which gave us back a connection we don’t always have in our daily lives. He is naturally curious which makes for a good traveller, and instead of questioning the things he suggested, I just went with it.
He was the one who said we should hire electric bikes when we arrived on Naoshima Island. He was the one who showed me how to accelerate and led me zipping up and down hills, laughing as I screamed in delight. He introduced me to the cool record stores of Tokyo, the endless electronic shops, and an archery place in a small coastal town.
He dragged me shopping for jeans in vintage stores down city laneways and made me catch buses that took us in the wrong direction entirely. He was unafraid and would walk into galleries and manage to communicate enough so the next minute we were being offered cups of steaming green tea and shown artwork not on the walls.
I saw him differently in Japan. Not the child running late for school or forgetting to eat a bowl of carrots and peas, but as someone taller than me who understood when to remove his shoes in an historic house, when to stand on a train so someone older could take his seat, and how to negotiate trying on clothes and buying things with his own money.
Travelling meant we were more like equals. He was just as likely as I was to know what train to catch, or find the right street to turn down, or stand in awe at the foot of a giant temple, or queue for hours for a steaming bowl of ramen. And instead of mourning the child version of him, I saw the adult he was becoming.
