Introduction

Once upon a time, my mom and I didn't get along very well. She had divorced my dad when I entered high school--I was the witness on their divorce agreement. We moved into an apartment where we lived with her boyfriend. My mom and Carl were married August 2003 on Duck Island in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. In one fell swoop, I got a stepfather whom I didn't much like and a stepbrother and sister I didn't know too well. Things went up and down. I moved out, then back in, then went to college, then came back after a week, then went to another college, and amidst much turmoil, I stayed there. We were fighting at the time.

Fall of 2004, I went back to school enraged at my mom. Months later, during the summer, I got an email: all of my stuff was in a storage unit in Fredericksburg, VA, and she had moved from northern Virginia to Seattle. Two months ago. I was furious and suffering from serious abandonment issues. When I explained to my favorite professor and department chair why my work might be late, she stared at me and asked, "How are you normal?"

After some more sturm and drang, my mom and I stopped fighting, and she embarked from Seattle on what was hopefully a 10-year sailing expedition. She and Carl each wrote down lists of things they wanted to do before they died. His number one was to save a human life. Her top-ten involved seeing different beautiful places in the world. Finally, after hand-crafting the interior of their boat (my mother programmed for a software company working for Cingular; Carl worked on the boat 12 hours a day), they Christened their boat Monju and set sail for Vancouver, then to South America.

In the meantime, my stepbrother was caught with drugs twice. His biological mother threw in the towel, and he was convicted of possession with intent to sell. My stepsister also went to jail on eight charges of various misdemeanors. Martin didn't graduate from college; he was in prison in Blacksburg. He was finally released on the condition that he live with family outside the NoVA area and attend rehab. My sister had a baby at age 20. My brother joined the National Guard.

My parents were in South America somewhere. Their only connection was through sometimes weekly, sometimes less frequent emails. Limited to 5kb each with no attachments, they drink up the news of the world and the goings on of our family through less than two pages of text every week. My mom's slightly broken English comments go back as far as the beginning of their trip, but I've only thought to keep them starting Summer of 2008.