Daughter Chooses Casual Sex Over Well-being of Senior Citizen Mother

I had just hit the official halfway point of the Greatest Hits Tour when my mother (aka Big Bad Betty, BBB, Trip B) met me in Thailand for two weeks.  This was a highly anticipated moment.  It had been a significant year of grieving and transition since we last saw each other.  And, this was a bold step for my mother -- her first trip overseas without my father and her first Asian experience.

With the excitement of seeing my mom and the pride in her for taking this brave step in her travel life, I had not really given much thought to the fact that I was traveling with my mother.  Now, don't get me wrong; traveling with your mother is awesome, especially if she is Big Bad Betty, the greatest mom in the world.  There are, however, a different set of rules and expectations to this travel arrangement.  Having spent months blazing my own trail, I occasionally forgot that this was a different ballgame...

The crowning moment of this took place when BBB and I were in Pai.  It is a small backpacker bonanza a few hours north of Chiang Mai, nestled in the mountains, full of organic-y restaurants and white people wearing Ali Baba pants.  It is sort of what I love and hate most about Thailand all at once.

It also happens to be the perfect place to bump into someone that you have seen previously on the tourist trail.  I have a skill for chance encounters anyways, but I also always interpret them with some degree of significance.  It, therefore, simultaneously felt like a grandly fateful moment and an obvious event when Trip B and I bumped into Stu.  I met Stu about a month prior in Bagan, Burma.  We were staying at the same accommodation and found ourselves sitting outside our neighboring rooms one afternoon, shooting the breeze while we were trying to catch a breeze (the electricity was out and the fans were not circulating).  We had a great conversation about life, love, the future, and our shared mid-western identities (he is from St. Louis and his grandmother lives in Allen Park!).  After that day, he went his own way with his temporary travel companion (a lovely American girl who happened to be 10 years my junior), and I went mine.

So, there we were again, a month later, on the streets of Pai, me with my mother and him quite notably without that young girl.  Obviously, I invited him to join me and Trip B for dinner.

If you know my mom, you understand that she is probably the world's best wing-woman.  A hallmark moment might be the Saturday night when I was laying in bed Granny Annie style, and I received a phone call at 11pm with the voice of a nice gentleman on the other end and my mother's muffled voice in the background:  "Hi.  Yeah, I just met your mom and she said that you are single and that I should call you."  Thanks, Mom.

She may not have realized it at the time, but she was really helping me lay the groundwork for action with this babe, Stu.  I have been defying my familial alcoholic roots and living a dry-ish lifestyle over the last three months.  It's not really possible, however, to stay on the wagon when Betty is in town.  So, along with dinner, there were a few beers.  As we were leaving the restaurant, we met a woman named Leanne (who BBB promptly started calling Cousin Leanne) trying to promote her bar.  Betty was onboard pretty much immediately, empathizing with the plight of a struggling bar owner and loving the opportunity to shove bar flyers in the hands of young tourists. We drank at Cousin Leanne's bar along with some of Betty's recruits, but Big Bad wasn't ready to party until dawn.  After a few cheap rum and cokes, she decided to retire.  Stu and I, on the other hand, decided to continue drinking.

Needless to say, I shared a bed with someone other than Big Bad Betty that night.

At 9:30am, my cell phone rang.  It took me a minute to realize that it was my phone. There were only three people that had my number in Thailand, so the sound of my phone buzzing was quite novel.  The caller ID told me that it was one of the three holders of my number -- my brother's ex-girlfriend.

Me: "Jules! What's up?"

Jules: "Girl, where are you? Your mom is so worried."

Good Lord, Betty contacted Jules!?!? Why??? How??? Whaaaaaaa???

Let me interject some important background information here.  This ex-girlfriend is not just any ex-girlfriend. My brother was in a relationship with Jules for seven years, and they only broke up a few moths ago. She is an absolutely amazing woman, so the loss of her has brought heartbreak to the whole family.  She lives in Chiang Mai now, and I met up with her for dinner a few days prior. My mom was adamant that she did not want to join us.  Seeing Jules would be too sad, too painful, and she didn't want to make things any harder for Jules by being an emotional hot mess.

Suddenly, Betty was singing a different tune when she was gripped with early morning anxiety. A missing in action daughter allowed her to put all that emotional baggage aside. My mother woke up at 7:30am thinking that I might be dead and, more importantly, that she might be left to fend for herself in northern Thailand. In her panicky resourcefulness, she realized that she had acquired one Thai phone number many months ago -- the number for Jules. In her state of desperation, she googled how to skype a Thai cell phone and connected with Jules -- the first contact she had had with her since the break-up with Tommy. She explained that I had abandoned her and asked Jules if she could help get a hold of me. Despite the fact that Jules is trying to pull herself out of the Skinner vortex, she was sucked right back in the middle, called upon to lead the search party for Betty's delinquent daughter.

I explained to Jules my whereabouts and asked her to let my mom know that I was with Stu and that I would return to the hotel right away. I pulled my hung-over self together and did the walk of shame back to my mother's place.

So, a quick recap here: I was traveling with my mom. I bumped into a babe with whom I had a great vibe. My mom basically paved the way for our night of romance. Intoxicated, I chose not to formally notify my mom of the naked sleepover (because maybe that would be a bit awkward anyways?). My mom freaked out and called my brother's ex-girlfriend. My brother's ex-girlfriend called me. I leave the babe in a rush because I am in big trouble with my mom.

Have I mentioned that I am 31 years old?

Betty and I spent most of that day debriefing the incident. I encouraged her to lay down a thick layer of guilt on me, but occasionally I attempted to defend myself. After a while, we entered the more light-hearted joking phase. At that point, Mom told me that if she wrote a blog, she would title her post, "Daughter Chooses Casual Sex Over Well-Being of Senior Citizen Mother." Because I actually have a blog, I thought I could materialize the humorous hypothetical post for her. I think it is about time that I tarnish my good name a bit anyways. It's the least I can do after leaving my poor mother to the Thailand worry wolves.

This is Burma

A few weeks ago, I had a day with heaps of time to kill and a hardcore hankering for some quality time with my email, so I headed to the nearest internet café.  When I walked in and inquired about using a computer, the employee informed me that the internet was not currently working.  That was fair enough, but due to my incessant need to plan, I asked a few more questions to determine when I should return or where else I might be able to find a connection.  What I gathered from this dude’s broken English was that there was no internet in the entire country.  Furthermore, there would be no internet for one month.  I became completely fascinated with this absurdity and began asking other people about this predicament.  The same answer kept finding me:  for about one month, the internet would be operating extremely slowly or not at all everywhere in the country because there was an underwater cable that had been damaged (one woman claiming that fish had been eating the hardware). 

This is Burma.

In essence, this is why I chose to spend nearly four weeks in this country.  I wasn’t drawn there on a mission to temple hop (though I certainly achieved that) or to see some wonders of geography (though I saw some pretty things) or for the lovely weather (it was often oppressively hot or oppressively rainy).  I went there because of the fascinating socio-political climate and to experience a minimally westernized nation that exists in one of the most heavily tourist trodden parts of the world.  Indeed, it was fascinating.    

Burma is the type of place that really makes me wish I was a bit smarter, a bit more informed…quite frankly, a bit less of the American stereotype who is clueless about international politics.  At the same time, I know that’s just not how I am wired.  I will probably always depend on my super smart friends and my experiential learning that comes through travel to explain these world issues.  I think it’s sort of the Skinner way.  I want to see it and feel it and converse about it.  There has got to be an emotional and/or experiential component to reel me in. 

What I’m trying to say is that I am far from an expert on Burma, but I’m going to do something radical and write a travel post (including some non-emotional facts about Burma) on my travel blog. 

Here’s the skinny:  Burma was a British colony until 1947.  The dude who was considered the father of independence, Aung San, was assassinated not long after.  In the wake, there was all sorts of chaos.  And, eventually, in 1962, there was a coup that has now led to the world’s longest ruling military dictatorship.  As you might imagine, this has been bad, bad, bad:  a bonanza of human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, a massacre in 1988, and the country’s leading lady of democracy (Aung San Suu Kyi -- Nobel Peace Prize winner who also happens to be the daughter of Aung San) under house arrest for almost 15 of the last 22 years.  For reasons that I only vaguely understand, the crazy military dictatorship decided to begin easing up on things in the last few years (I’m in the middle of reading a book called ‘Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads’, so perhaps when I finish the book I will understand that piece of the puzzle and can report back.)  After an election a little over a year ago, there is now some civilian representation in government.  Many (but certainly not all) political prisoners have been freed, and some of the crazy laws have been eased (like, now, the newspapers can actually report on the news).  So, there seems to be hope for democracy and reconciliation, but people are not quite joining hands and singing Kumbaya.

I felt that this political situation was evident in some ways, but it was generally only detectable if you were looking for it.  The Average Joes were not walking the streets with their heads down, sad and afraid.  The military men were not walking the streets, busting heads.  People were just living their lives, doing their thing.  I have no doubt that just about every single person in the country has a sad story to tell related to the dictatorship, but on the surface, people were smiling and laughing and generally overflowing with gentle kindness. 

Having said that, there are surely signs of the government’s legacy of crazy control.  The whole country shuts down by 9pm.  I don’t know what that necessarily means, but I know it means something.  Burma is markedly behind its neighbors in terms of level of development, particularly in terms of technology.  I haven’t seen such a lack of mobile phone use since the US in 2001.  There are power outages across entire cities for several hours just about every day.  The isolation from Western culture is impressive.  I mean, men are wearing skirts (which I thought was smoking hot and highly practical, by the way).

*Um, so this guy was NOT one of the smokin' hot babes, but he was a total nugget.

Perhaps most telling of Burma’s isolation was the fact that there were so few white folks around.  As a tourist who tries to tone down her tourist-ness, it felt nice to be in a place that was not full of people like me.  There were certainly other travelers, but the numbers were a small fraction of what you find in Thailand.  (Of course, I always find this sort of conversation amongst travelers to be slightly ridiculous:  we like to go places where we don’t see many people like us…but then by going there ourselves, we are increasing the number of people like us who are in that place.  What gives me the right to go somewhere and complain about there being so many tourists if I am, in fact, a tourist as well?) 

Being a tourist is currently my lifestyle, so I give the role a lot of thought.  What Burma made me think about was that tourists, perhaps, should take on more activist responsibilities.  (Well, I guess I sort of believe that as human beings we have a responsibility to be activists, but that is material for another blog post…)  Bad things are happening all the time, all over the world, in every country I have visited, and, most notably, in my very own homeland.  So, let me be clear that Burma’s human rights issues did not exactly open my closed eyes to the world of injustice.  Burma was, however, a reminder of all of those bad things happening all over the world.  And, it was a reminder that there are a whole bunch of people like me that go to these places where bad things are happening to have one hell of a good time.  Then, what?  Well, then we go home and go back to our jobs and maybe save money until we have enough to go to some other country that is ohmygodsocheap. 

This is how I think about it:  If someone walked into my house, just to have a look, and noticed that I had a broken refrigerator and then left saying, “Interesting.  That girl has a broken fridge.  That must suck.”  And, then, more and more people did the same thing – like, one million more.  If no one ever stopped to say, “yo, do you want some help with that fridge?  I’m kind of a handy man, and I know a guy…”  I would be a bit irritated.  

I don’t know how to fix a fridge.  I’m not even sure I know a guy who knows how to fix a fridge.  But, I don’t want to be that asshole that doesn’t even try to provide my useless help.  So, that’s the point of this blog post.  I just want Burma to know that I see their broken fridge and to inform others about it.  I mean, maybe someone reading this blog is a skilled fridge repairman.

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A few asides:

1.        The one month internet crash ended up being false.  I was able to check my email the very next day.  Someone explained to me that there was one news source that printed a story along the lines that I heard.  I have no idea if there was any truth to it, and, if there was not, why anyone would want to spread such a rumor.

2.       I call the country Burma, not Myanmar (as you will see it labeled on maps).  Here is why:  "Burma's democracy movement prefers the form 'Burma' because theydo not accept the legitimacy of the unelected military regime to change theofficial name of the country. Internationally, both names are recognised."