‘Papa, Pipi’
Lucia recently turned three. We celebrated her birthday in high-altitude Peruvian fashion at 3600m: papas a la huancaína, a plate of boiled potatoes (her favorite food) with yellow chili-sauce. She blew out the candles on a lucuma-flavored cake. We sat in the sun, enjoyed the Cordillera Blanca’s fresh air, and talked about the Quechua-speaking societies living in Peru. At some point in the festivities, Lucia came to me and said “Papa, pipi.” And with those two words, I knew it was too late.
Despite getting older, Lucia is experiencing potty training relapse. It’s hard to blame her though, put yourself in her tiny shoes. Imagine you had just learned that you no longer had to pee in a plastic pair of shorts all day, every day. That instead of a scratchy diaper there is another way, and it’s right there in your room, or just down the hall. Pipi independence was never so easy! And then your parents move you and your sister in to a van, and there are no toilets in sight. And at every stop, there’s a new toilet located in a new bathroom, but getting there is a labyrinth for your toddler mind. Plus, locating the bathroom is the least of your cares.
Lucia’s regression means a lot of work for us, like hand washing underwear, weekly, sometimes daily; picking her up and running to the bathroom, hoping the floodgates have not yet opened; hanging her butt out the window; and smelling a lot of baby urine.
In her world, she plays, runs around the van with her sister, chases puppies and climbs things, and when the urge arrives, where does she go? One solution is a folding plastic potty we take out at campgrounds but not so much on village streets. Another solution involved teaching her how to pee outside. We’ve used both with some degree of success, though the latter had us recently cleaning up steamy piles of diarrhea next to the swing set at a campground. I guess this is better than forgetting to go to the bathroom.
The process of un-training the potty-trained brain probably has a lot to do with life on the move, with the uncertainty of it all, and the constantly changing scenery. Lucia is experiencing the same travel shock as the rest of us, only she is manifesting it in the way a two or three year old would.
When it’s time to pee, “Where am I?” is probably the first question that pops in her head. Again, I can’t blame her. Sometimes I forget where I am. I wake up in the middle of the night with my mind tripping over names of villages, places, and mountains. I spend minutes going over the previous day’s events, the villages we drove through and, the edge of the mountain where we parked. I dote on where we will drive to next and fret about the bad roads and whether our house will make it to our next stop, in Peru, in Bolivia, Argentina… And then, before I fall back to sleep, I reach over and pee in a bottle, because I too can’t be bothered with finding the bathroom!
Since we live in a campervan, knowing where we are shouldn’t be all that complicated. Yet keeping track of where the van is parked is much harder when zigzagging across the Andes. As passengers on this journey, we can “suddenly” find ourselves anywhere: a random village, next to a river with a name we can’t pronounce, or tucked in for the night sleeping 4,000 meters above sea level.
The uncertainty of where you will “live” tomorrow is exhilarating. It gives you the opportunities to experience the notion of surprise. In our every day lives, we work hard to reduce uncertainty to a tolerable level, to assure control over as many variables as possible: house, check; reliable vehicle, check; a career, check; school for the kids, check. Society has conditioned us to do so in order to pave the way for a life of comfort and ease, one that is increasingly difficult to relinquish. In this settled life, surprises seem to come in spurts, and most of them are manufactured, the Santa Claus and tooth fairy sorts.
Living on the road in nomadic fashion prepares you to deal with the disruptions and the interference of everything you didn’t plan for. Out here every day brings a new surprise: the weather, the food, the delays in construction that nobody could possibly tell you about, and your three year old pooping on the grass. Whether you want to admit it or not, there is not much control, and your happiness depends on your ability to accept it, deal with it, and move on. One morning, parked in a small village outside of the town Huanta, we got a knock on the window. We looked out to find a plump woman with a basket of fresh bread on her arm. After a long day of driving the day before, the joy of warm bread overcame us all. Lucia and Elisa jumped up and down, for bread. We clapped and smiled and laughed that bread was being delivered through the van window. Bread, a small surprise in a day of unknowns.
