Passports = The Beginning in Days of My Destiny

Our passports arrived in the mail today, woohoo!!

I've always been the kind of person who cannot get excited for events until I'm that close to them. The first time I ever caught a plane, I was with my sister on a school choir trip. Weeks leading up to it, everyone around me was excited, my sister included. Everyone but me. The excitement didn't hit until I was IN THAT PLANE and it was taking off, making its thunderous roars below me. THAT was when it hit me and I looked over at my sister, who looked over at me, and we squealed our hearts and lungs and intestines out, lol. (Such a cool memory!)

This year I've been quite busy as you know, with the Drovers Campfire and the Committee business. My life itself is mostly a To Do List. There are kids to bathe, feed and put to bed and spend quality time with and ensure are happy. There's a husband to love and make love to and work around with shift work. There's training, there are meetings, there are friends to catch up with occasionally and emails to read. So when the trip to Chile was first mentioned, to me it was A Must. It wasn't an exciting Must, mind you - it was just one more thing to add to the list. It didn't help that I had to organize passports and along the way I realised I had to organize for new birth certificates for 3/4 of the family, as well as an official marriage certificate seeing as ours wasn't official and so on. Lots of photocopying ensued as well as appointments with JPs to get everything certified and so on and bla bla bla.

When the passports arrived, I was happy. More relieved that a huge chunk of responsibility is DONE. They are here now, in our possession, ready for us to be able to formalise our travels.

But it wasn't until L said it that it hit me. He said, "So... passports!!!!" and motioned an aeroplane take-off with his hand. It filled my stomach with butterflies!!!!!!

I've done a little bit of reading on what we can do while in Santiago. The thing is... I personally have done most of the things that tourists should do while there. I'm not too excited by many of it, but I still want to take my kids and husband along. My husband and I LOVED La Feria Artesanal, where all these amazing colours fill your senses and you literally get lost in the maze that is the gigantic central city market, full of handmade goods! I could never get sick of that place. I've only been to Chile twice in my life and twice I went to those markets and twice I did not cover the entire thing! I will always be happy to go back there, lol.

Then there's the zoo. That's kid-friendly. There's Cerro Santa Lucia which I've done. The views are pretty cool from up there, but it's not new to me. I want to do Cerro San Cristobal. Especially because it's higher and there's a photo of my dad and all his siblings up there when they were little. I don't know how old dad is in that photo, but his older sister has a beanie on in that photo, because my grandad caught her smoking and made her shave all her precious hair off. She's not smiling in that photo (none of them ever had reason much to smile, as it was).

I'm looking forward to seeing my family again, even though in they exist only in the periphery of my life. These people only held real dear meaning to me the first time I went to Chile at the age of Just Turned 17. All my life we received videos in the mail from them, gathered at some family party or another, always singing and talking into the lens. They bored me, there were so many of them and no matter how hard I tried I could never remember who was who, or who was whose kid for that matter. It was frustrating. But when I met them for the first time.... these faces became people to me. Real people with personalities and quirks and senses of humour and pet hates and character traits I could relate to. Over that first visit, over the course of 3 months, these people came to mean so much to me and held a great secret to my entire existence that was finally palpable to me. It was such a change that leaving was so difficult. They had transformed me so that hugging one of my cousins goodbye lasted a good forty-five minutes and involved a lot of disgusting snot running down my nose and onto his shirt and vice versa!!!

I mean how the hell does that happen?!?!?! If you've grown up in Australia and have your extended family in Australia and you see them at the family BBQ - even if it's only at Christmas time - then you ALWAYS have that Point Of Reference in your life. Because that's what extended family is - a point of reference. Even when everyone else in your life goes to shit, and even if family relations are shit - they are your point of reference. Your blood ties, whether you like it or not. But you see, when you are the child of a migrant, you don't have any family ties or points of reference - not even shit ones.

And so when I finally could FEEL - in my heart and soul - that these people whose faces I knew actually identified to me as My Own Point Of Reference In Life....... they changed me.

I moved home and enrolled in school again to finish high school. I met people who meant nothing to me, nor was I interested in them in the slightest. They paled in comparison to where I'd been and who I'd known, and I knew deep down that they could never ever replace the treasure I now carried with me.

Over time, of course, life moved on and I was disillusioned with the way communication simply stopped. For all their kind words and promises, not one of them kept up their end of the deal. Looking back, neither did I really, and I was foolish enough to think that I should expect unnerving loyalty from them without having to do any of the work.

The years passed. I went to China. I kept in loose touch with some of them while there. I moved home. I moved out. I met L. I worked. I drank. I partied. I hung out. I hungover-ed. A lot. Then I married. Life just moved on.

For my 25th birthday, I wanted a Round The World trip. My forever-amazing husband somehow made it happen. Part of that trip included an extremely brief stop in Chile for 10 days. I saw my grandma and there were two family reunions while I was there. One with the uncles, one without. I had a child then. I enjoyed these people again, this time knowing it would only be brief, but still knowing that these people held a warm spot in my heart. I was fond of them now, whereas I had not been fond of them prior to my first trip.

The difference between my first and second trips was that my first trip involved many, many, many lengthy conversations with a few uncles and cousins. Fleshing things out, philosophising, getting to know each other, them giving me advice. Me taking it all in, admiring them, allowing them to mold me into something better. The second trip was brief. It was like, I was there and they dropped in to look at me and my husband. They smiled. We sang karaoke. My husband and I had a night out with a few cousins. One of the cousins had completely snubbed me on my first ever trip, so I wasn't interested in him or his girlfriend that night. The other cousin was like a best friend to me, and the other cousin was much younger and massively crushed on L and danced with him. In my mind I danced between allowing this exotic experience to evolve naturally and shutting her out of my life forever.

Now...... four years later.... we have a second child. My husband and I have worked through some pretty tough things in our relationship. We are - and I am - different again, to who we were in that last trip. We are a full-on family. We've said before that having one kid is a bit like being a couple - with a kid. You are two adults, plus one small sized human. When you have a second child, at least with the age gap our kids have, you BECOME A FAMILY. You have no choice but to throw every single last drop of energy left into this little family UNIT. You are equally two adults and equally two small children. You suddenly don't just nurture the one small human, you nurture two small humans AS WELL AS act as Liaison Officer between the two small humans. You oversee absolutely everything. And so...... with this NEWER development in our identity as a FAMILY - we now embark on yet another trip to Chile.

This time, I will spend one week in Santiago and one week slightly up north with my mother and grandmother. I want my children to meet my grandmother and I want a photo of them and her and me and mum and my sisters. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can guarantee I will not be seeing my grandmother again. This saddens me but I don't think about it too much. Though when L asked me the other night in the shower if this fact makes me sad, I just couldn't even talk about it. I had tears and I couldn't talk, turning my face away from him so he wouldn't make me sadder by giving me a look that says he knows that this is sadder to me than I even know.

I don't want to be a tourist (as in, do all the touristy things), but at the same time, I do want to ensure my children have a good time there. And this will happen by doing a couple of touristy things, such as visiting the zoo and those awesome markets. I refuse to fill my days with Things To Do and more Things To Do. I will be busy enough without organizing any of that. I plan to take one day at a time. Wake up, see where our hearts' desire lays for the morning, and go from there. Most likely our hearts' desire will be in walking down the street and buying some Mani Confitado from a local. It's what we did every.single.day last time we were there, lol. I could never regret putting on weight from a daily little bag of that delicious little treat! LOL! I just hope it's one of those things that sells year-through rather than only at summertime. We were there in summer last time. It'll be winter this time. We will freeze, but we will be okay. Our souls will be happy, and that's the main thing.