Terrible Princesses
One of my least favorite facets of the terrible threes is the tears and emotion connected to a little girl’s clothing. In Bogotá, we lived through this phase with Elisa, our first daughter. Every morning, I dreaded the role of director of wardrobe, responsible for going to the closet to pick up, offer, and discard every piece of clothing she has until collapsing in frustration and dressing her in the same old skirt and t-shirt from the last three days. Sometimes the three-year-old’s mind is really neurotic, and only a unicorn-printed underwear will do.
Whether it’s the pressure exerted from other little girls at pre-school or a result of having figured out the power of making a choice, these little minds will neither be swayed nor coerced. And the only thing standing between you and them getting their way is a fit of high pitch screaming, punching, and if you’re lucky, insults like “stupid papi” or “malo papa”. And even then, she won’t wear all the clothing you’ve managed to pile up in her closet.
As a six-year-old, Elisa has adopted a much more reasonable approach to clothing choices, the function of sturdy long pants versus a dress, cotton versus polyester, and the value of a hoody. Her sister on the other hand, is now hitting peak three-year-old. Lucia has terrible judgment, and since she is always complaining of the heat, she continuously tries to remove as much clothing as quickly as possible. In the campervan there is no escaping it, and on top of all this, she thinks she is a princess. A three-year old can be a terrifying princess.
I guess it doesn’t matter whether she is traveling across South America in a campervan or attending preschool, the princess effect is unavoidable: every little girl wants a frilly dress that sparkles and shines. Despite encouraging the opposite-we’ve never bought a princess dress or a storybook-the princess myth will reach your daughters, and maybe even a few of your sons.
The Patagonia is no place for little princesses: temperatures rise and fall as quickly as the day and night, and the winds are heinous. Rainstorms are sudden, and extreme heat creeps in with no warning. Patagonia’s Atlantic coast is a bleak landscape constantly blowing. In the heyday of European expansionism, the English came to these shores and reported back to the Queen that the south Atlantic of the Americas had nothing to offer. With no water, there was no reason to bring the crown. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the hearty Welshman came with his sturdy sheep and carved out an existence in the bend of the few rivers. The rest is history.
This is the Patagonia you don’t read about, the one without granite spires that isn’t filled with rainforests, glaciers, or fiords. It’s a windblown flatland, a dinosaur graveyard, and a place where marine life thrives on the land’s utter emptiness. Little has changed over the years. The whales, sea lions, and penguins still flourish in the frigid blue. The sheep still putter about waiting to be shorn. And the cities and towns, with their name signs in Gymraeg, AKA Welsh, and Spanish, teeter on the edge, ever in danger of being blown apart by the wind. If anything has changed the region over the past five decades, it is the people like us, the tourists, who come for the warmer months. Tourists create the need for more pavement, which then creates the need for a visitor’s center, trails, and regulations.
As we drove from the Atlantic Ocean westwards, once again towards the Andes, once again crossing this incredible continent, Patagonia’s middle country welcomed us to the South American dustbowl. This is Chubut, a place so Utah-esque in nature, it’s no wonder famed outlaw Butch Cassidy came here to hide. Out here, between the hideouts are only herds of Guanaco, flocks of Rhea, and armadillos, the hairiest shelled creature I have every seen. We finally stopped in a ball of dust at the base of Piedra Parada, a bizarre 250-meter freestanding tower on the banks of the Chubut river. We were so excited to make it somewhere that wasn’t nowhere, and when we turned around, there was Lucia, already undressed in the backseat. Because she was too hot.
“But mommy, I can see the plants aren’t moving very much. I can wear my dress,” she argued. A terrible threes pataleta (tantrum in Spanish) was quick to follow. Yes, Lucia prefers flip-flops to shoes, wears a dress in the snowstorm, and rides naked in the carseat, but ever since we got to Patagonia, these habits are slowly changing. With enough time spent at the end of the world, she just might shed the princess act, and become a plucky Patagón, ready to shear the sheep come November.
The terrible threes are terrible; traveling with children can also be terrible. Put the two together and you get the point. The campervan life doesn’t allow our little girls to have everything a princess might have in her suburban castle: no costumes, no crowns, no magic wands. And it also doesn’t allow us parents everything afforded to a king: no space, no control, and no rest. But in our Rainbow kingdom, we all have experienced and learned more in one year of travel than most princesses do in a lifetime.
