Becoming a Nomad

My first adventure began during the hot summer of 1988 in soviet Tallinn, Estonia. Holding my mother’s hand, I waited to board the big-winged metal bird that would carry me from my new home to my beloved birthplace of Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was five years old, my backpack was larger than I was, and my eyes were filled with wonder. In 1988, the world was safe and this child was going to travel. My mother, recently single, handed me off to the ‘pretty stewardess lady’, and I was on my way.

My adventure did not stop there. Over the years, traveling became my companion, solace, and a mechanism of choice for overcoming adversity and challenge. If it was time for a new car, I traveled. If I had boyfriend problems, I traveled. If my life was in pieces, I traveled and picked up the pieces as I went along.

These nomadic tendencies usually involved me physically moving in space, but there were times when it was the movement of others that impacted me. Such was the case one spring day in 1998 when I cried in a long distance call center as my mother, a fresh US immigrant, was consoling me from the other side of Atlantic. Her voice, traveling through a myriad tubes to my lone phone booth, sounded unusually hoarse and distant. On that April Fool’s Day, she had made an unfortunate joke of telling me she would be coming home soon.