Essay written by Hannah Howard
I’m writing this from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, sitting at a tiny table outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting for my flight home to Chicago. Around me: rolling suitcases, half-drunk iced coffees, families trying to reorganize themselves before boarding. There’s something oddly vulnerable about airports — everyone in transition at once. Between places. Between versions of themselves.
I almost didn’t come on this trip.
It’s the middle of May, otherwise known to parents everywhere as Maycember: the completely unhinged sprint to the end of the school year. Next week alone I’m chaperoning a field trip, and my daughter has a ballet recital, a cheerleading performance, and kindergarten graduation. There are permission slips and snack requests and spirit days and laundry and work deadlines and all the invisible labor that keeps a family moving.
The list felt so long before I left, that saying yes to a work trip almost seemed irresponsible.
And yet, I came.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot in relation to this month’s conversation around values, vision, and the operating systems we inherit versus the ones we choose.
Because I think one of the operating systems many women — especially mothers — absorb is the idea that our own expansion should always come second. That if something is not strictly necessary for the functioning of the household, it becomes optional. Extraneous. Self-indulgent, even. But sitting here now, tired in a satisfying way, I know this trip mattered to me for reasons beyond work.
Yes, I was here to write and report and gather material.
But I was also here because curiosity is one of my values.
Growth is one of my values.
Aliveness is one of my values.
And increasingly, I think honoring those values makes me a better mother, not a worse one.
This trip reminded me that I am not only a person who keeps things running, I am also a person who wants to see new places. Who wants to learn. Who feels energized by conversations with strangers and the texture of unfamiliar cities and long dinners and gathering stories.
I got to travel with a friend, which felt meaningful in its own quiet way. Adult friendship can become so logistical in this phase of life — voice notes, reschedules, quick check-ins while unloading groceries or sitting in pickup lines.
And suddenly here we were, walking through Cincinnati together, talking without interruption, laughing over cocktails, deciding where to go next with no one asking us for a snack or help finding a shoe.
I got to sleep in a pitch-black hotel room where nobody touched me or woke me up all night.
I sat down with the cheesemakers at Urban Stead Cheese and tasted through their cheeses while we talked about the inexorable link between cheese and community — how the best food is never really only about food. How it becomes a gathering point, a language, a way people care for each other. We talked about place and fermentation and neighborhoods and risk and building something slowly with your hands.
I lingered over earrings in a tiny shop because I could. I drank a very esoteric pét-nat with a delightfully foul-mouthed winemaker who clearly loved to hear himself talk, and somehow that, too, felt life-giving — this reminder that the world is still full of deeply specific, eccentric, passionate people.
And that’s part of what travel gives me. Not just rest. Not just inspiration. But texture.
It breaks the spell of hyper-functionality.
At home, especially during seasons like this, it is so easy to become a machine for managing life. Scheduling life. Optimizing life. Moving everyone through life.
Travel interrupts that. It reminds me to notice things again.
The curve of the Roebling Bridge against the gray sky. The way a restaurant sounds when everyone is slightly tipsy and happy. The sharp creaminess of a cheese tasted at exactly the right temperature. The pleasure of wandering without urgency. The strange intimacy of airports.
Every time I leave home — even briefly — I come back slightly rearranged. More awake. More present. More myself.
And I think that’s the value underneath all of it.
Remembering that I am still a person with a mind and a palate and ambition and curiosity and a hunger for beauty and conversation and discovery.
Someone still becoming.
Tell me in the comments:
Do you feel like you are constantly doing-doing-doing, and never able to exist as a being? How do you disrupt the onslaught of daily tasks and find a way to remember who you are? I want to hear about all of it.
This year, I asked one of our WWC members if she would write about her experience inside of The Wise Women’s Council, my ongoing group coaching program. Previously, she wrote about changing her relationship to rest, slowing down to be present to her own life, and the dangerous trap of comparative joy. This month, we’re digging into our core values and how they help us make decisions about the way we show up to our lives. If you’re looking for a group coaching program for women, check out The Wise Women’s Council and apply to join.
— Sarah K Peck
Hannah Howard is the author of the memoirs Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. She writes for Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Bon Appetit. Hannah lives in Chicago with her family and loves stinky cheese. Subscribe to her Substack, Letters from Hannah. She is also a member of The Wise Women’s Council.
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My friends experience Maycember, but as a parent to two boys and a caregiver to the youngest, I find myself wishing I were their level of busy with managing typical kid life.
And yet, I still experience the same when I travel with girlfriends- I get to shift focus to life around me and away from the constant demands of managing family life. I love that description- to all the texture and personalities that includes.
Very well written. Also, interesting observation about the vulnerability of airports with everybody in a state of transition- so true.
This is such an important experience and I wrote something incredibly similar earlier this year! https://drannewelsh.substack.com/p/i-almost-convinced-myself-not-to?r=39kdsy&utm_medium=ios