You’re Supposed to Outgrow Vacation With Your Mom. I’m So Glad I Haven’t

What I love most about traveling isn’t seeing the famous landmarks, eating great food, or learning new things. It’s watching my mom gasp at something beautiful and unexpected. In Yellowknife it was her reaction to the bright green swirls of the aurora borealis. In Japan, 3,000 cherry trees at Mount Yoshinoyama. In the Canadian Rockies, the snow-capped mountains perfectly reflected in the surface of the Waterfowl Lakes. To get to them, we’d had to travel tremendous distances and time our trips just right. All of them were better because we saw them together.

When I tell people how much I like to travel with my mom, the places we go, and the length of time we spend together, the immediate reactions are often bewilderment and surprise. We expect parents to show their children the world—make all the arrangements and drive to the cool locations, plus pack enough food, sunscreen, and tickets to go around. When children become adults, the progression is implied: They’ll travel with friends, partners, and at some point their own kids (if they have them). They no longer have to see the world through their parents’ eyes.

As a child, I understood just how the world looked to my parents—and what roles they played within it. My mother was my teacher, my source of comfort, and my primary guardian. She never pressured me to excel; only to be thoughtful, honest, hard-working, and mindful of my sister. She is responsible for everything that makes me a good person. And on our trips, she was responsible for that, plus everything else. It fell to my mother to plan and organize. She’s kind, smart, patient, and generous, but the stress was unpleasant at best. She was rarely able to relax, tasked with completing every task involved in our annual vacations except the driving itself. She booked all the hotels, mapped out where to eat, navigated with paper maps, managed our passports, washed clothes, and tracked expenses.

Some of our earliest excursions were bus trips from Toronto to American cities like Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, and Philadelphia; later we made overnight trips to Niagara Falls. But our most frequent destination was to Walt Disney World and Universal Studios. We went more than a dozen times. We attempted most of them after cheap multiday Caribbean cruises, and my dad almost always drove the entire 20-plus hours from Toronto to the Sunshine State over the course of two days.

My mother tried asking my dad to see other places and the West Coast—the Grand Canyon, or cities in California or Vancouver—but he ignored her. He claimed the trips saved money and my sister and I enjoyed the theme parks so much; why mess with the formula? Eventually itineraries expanded to include cruises to Greece, Italy, and Scandinavia. But still my mother’s input was rarely solicited.

When my parents divorced a few years ago, the calculus shifted. Their lives (and mine) hadn’t turned out as anticipated. I hadn’t become a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer—the immigrant parents’ dream. Instead I became a business and culture journalist after taking my family’s love of travel a step further by backpacking solo through nine Latin American countries for more than four months. After my parents split up, I knew my mom wanted to travel, but she couldn’t always find a friend to go with her and didn’t want to go alone.

Because of what I do, I can’t write my mother a prescription or a massive check, but it struck me in 2016 that the work I do affords us both unique opportunities. At 29, I booked two tickets to Yellowknife, the capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories, where I had worked as a business reporter at a local paper the year before. We would explore the world as equals; I could help my mother see the world on her own terms.

Before our adventure to the sub-Arctic, our first mother-daughter trip was in 2013, after my Uncle Paul was diagnosed with cancer. My mother, his sister, wanted to visit him in Hong Kong after his radiation treatments, and I had just been laid off from my first job that summer. Decent savings, no student debt, and a sudden abundance of free time made me the obvious companion, especially since I had never seen my parents’ birthplace. My mom also ruled that limiting ourselves to Hong Kong “seemed really boring,” so we tacked on three major cities in Japan, stretching the trip into a four-week expedition. “We didn’t have to pay that much extra to go,” she later told me.

In Hong Kong, Mom showed me where she grew up and how to ride the double-decker streetcars. She explained all the neighborhoods and gently briefed me on the different relatives I was meeting for the first time or hadn’t seen in a decade. She took charge of our itinerary, and I was happy to cede control. But when she got sick with food poisoning, I made sure she ate simple carbs, took her to the doctor, and shrugged when we had to cancel an overnight trip to Macau.

In Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, I handled all the hotel bookings, ticket purchases, photo opportunities, and navigation. We toured dozens of shrines, temples, parks, and landmarks; stuffed our faces at restaurants and markets; and caught a glimpse of Mount Fuji while on the bullet train. Despite her understandable Mickey Mouse fatigue, I even convinced her to spend a day with me at Tokyo DisneySea. I will never forget her delight at the red maple trees, the fresh persimmons, the modestly adventurous rides.

We fought once, on our second-to-last day, over the notoriously early whole tuna auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market. Mom didn’t want to go and risk not being chosen for the limited number of spots, and I couldn’t just leave her in the middle of the night to try and see it by myself. We ended up going to the inner market around 9:30 A.M., just in time to watch several sellers divvy up the massive fish for sale and shipping while other fishmongers washed and sharpened their long, elegant knives. But the trip to Hong Kong and Japan showed me how much pleasure we drew from exploring new places together, and how much we could accomplish on our own. My mother later told me she had a lot more fun in Hong Kong, even on the days we didn’t do much but eat simple food, nap, or walk around the city. A previous trip with my dad had left her exhausted from rushing around.

I didn’t know I could give that kind of experience to my mother, someone who had clearly sacrificed so much time, energy, and happiness for her family even while on vacation. I felt both pride and sadness that it had taken so long for her to have someone who listened to and cared about what she wanted to see, eat, and do. It made me realize a vacation with someone you care about isn’t just about an adventure in a new place, it’s also about learning what makes each person happy, and how you can help each other with challenges so no one has to face them alone.

After that trip I didn’t expect a repeat. Travel brochures don’t tend to feature photos of people who look like us, and a career in journalism usually means very little money and time off. But I kept finding opportunities and excuses to whisk my mother off to new places, often on a reasonable budget.

I used credit card points and a cheap annual companion fare for inexpensive, weeklong trips to show Mom the Northern Lights and the mountains between Banff and Jasper. A scholarship covered the full cost of graduate school, freeing up funds that I might have spent on classes—I used them to go with my mother and sister to Mexico. Volunteering to be bumped onto a later flight meant we were upgraded to business class and handed $1,000 cash vouchers for our flights to Tokyo, almost the exact same amount as our round-trip airfare back to Japan to realize Mom’s dream of seeing the cherry blossoms in full bloom.

Our adventures are not without their harder moments. We’ve navigated the temperatures of the sub-Arctic, gotten on the wrong train, and endured mediocre accommodations, encounters with wild animals, and even a lost passport. We have argued over how I walk too fast, whose fault it is that we’re stuck in the rain (twice), the conditions of our cramped hotel rooms, and whether it was worth it to splurge on a meal at a sushi restaurant featured in No Reservations. (Verdict: She’s glad we did it.)

But despite those difficulties, I have never regretted any of the trips with my mother. Instead of shying away from the unknown, we have countless memories and stories of what it’s like to lean into the challenge together with patience, enthusiasm, and an excellent pair of hiking shoes. Before our trips, I had no idea how much my mom loved the mountains or hot springs, and how fit she really is. Most of all, I never knew how much I could love her as a friend.

Children don’t have opportunities to lavish a lot of time and attention on their parents, and when we do, it tends to be tied to some deeply stressful event—a wedding, the birth of a child, or a serious illness. I’m not ready to get married or have children. My mother and I are both healthy. With my mother turning 70 this year, both of us understand how quickly things can change and we no longer want to put things off. And being free from the expectations of those life-event moments allows us to focus on simply enjoying each other’s company and make the most of the time when we are together.

To celebrate my mother’s birthday, my sister and I are going with her on a two-week half-tour of Spain. She has been dreaming of seeing Barcelona for years. But really, the pleasure is all mine.

Karen K. Ho is a freelance writer and business reporter based in New York. She covers money, media, and culture.

Originally Appeared on Glamour