I know any Sprinter-dwelling millennial reading this is cringing right now, but yeah, that’s what happened. Experiences are fun and I’ve traveled the world, but these days I get more enjoyment from sitting at home playing with my toys — and there’s not a damn thing wrong with it.

I don’t envy the generations that have followed mine. Right now, a lot sucks: the economy sucks, the music (mostly) sucks, the government sucks, the Supreme Court especially sucks. So does college debt and the real estate market. My parents’ generation started some bullshit and millennials and Gen Z are suffering the consequences, and that also sucks. And Gen X? Everyone forgets about us, but that’s fine. We made a lotta noise back in the day, and if we’ve made any sort of success of ourselves since, we’re generally content leveraging our social and financial power to continue to work for change.

But, as my grandmother used to say, kids these days got the shit end of the stick (my grandma was a special lady, for sure), so yeah… play music while the ship sinks, because unfortunately, there won’t be room on the door for everyone. I’m not knocking it, just don’t knock me for wanting to hang out at home (and by that I don’t just mean ‘where my heart is’).

Like many experience-chasers of today, I spent some of my twenties and most of my thirties having adventures, too. While most of my generational cohort was scrambling to sell a start-up, buy real estate and squeeze out a couple of kids, I walked out of professional life and happily lost the plot for a while.

For sure, I was seeking better ways of being then: I wanted to see what was beautiful in the world, and I thought it was “out there.” I fell in love with traveling, meeting new people, being blown away by spectacular nature, cycling through lovers, and picking up and moving elsewhere when the vibe changed. I sneered at people who took two week vacations because “no one gets to know a place in two weeks.”

And then, one day, I changed. And to be honest, it wasn’t a “one day” thing but an accumulation of factors that made me realize I was kind of over moving around.

The first factor is now 11. I realize millennials are opting out of parenthood entirely in lieu of monetizing their dogs, but I really didn’t hear my biological clock ticking either. My daughter’s conception when I was 36 is a story for another time, but for most of her incubation and the first year and a half of her life, we were road dawgs. She saw both ocean coasts and over 30 state parks and national forests by the time she was six months old. She slept like, well, a baby, any time you put her in a tent or a car seat.

I could tell I was getting tired when our stays started getting longer. Our final one before settlement lasted nine months. We were living a really blissful existence on a farm in northern California, until a neighbor downhill threatened to call CPS on me for “living in a tent with a baby” (our home was a fully-outfitted, top-of-the-line, insulated yome with a large deck and a wood stove). I threw what little we owned back in the car and hit the road, again.

It was my daughter, eighteen months old at this point, who put the halt on our travels entirely. Speaking up from the backseat, she made it very clear. “Mama, want HOUSE.”

Okay then. Heard. We went to visit friends further north and didn’t leave that little mountain town for nearly a decade.

My daughter is eleven now and values stability. She likes being part of a group of friends, part of a sports team, part of a stage performance. She is not like me, at all, in those regards (I’m the nicest backstage-crew misanthrope you’ll ever meet). Also, she still talks my ear off and is incredibly demanding. The girl knows what she wants.

When I was accepted into the Ada Comstock Scholars Program at Smith, I’d just lost my job and most of my freelance work thanks to Covid-19. We’d established ourselves in that mountain community though. We had history with people. We knew the good, bad, and the ugly about each other, officiated marriages, helped each other move after the divorce. My daughter had never had to make friends. Even when she changed schools in town it hardly mattered, because she still knew everyone there.

Smith, however, was offering a prestigious degree, a full scholarship, and a free apartment for the next three years. I’d never even been to Massachusetts, but there were no other certains in our life anymore at that point. We had to go.

She was distraught, and that first year was really hard. We’d moved from wide open wilderness to a New England hamlet that was, for us anyway, crowded, compact, and, thanks to the pandemic, completely shut down. We knew no one and both of us did our first years of school there online from our free apartment. I completely uprooted her, ripped up her world, and it hurt to see her suffer. I know these things supposedly build “resilience” (whatever that means), but I felt like the world’s worst mother.

Fast-forward two years. We have a year left in the free apartment. I’m not a big fan of Northampton, Massachusetts, which is kind of like Park Slope north (2.5 kids and a labradoodle? Sold your Brooklyn brownstone and can cash offer everyone else out of a house? Wecome home!).

My daughter’s established herself there now, though. She’s into dance and lacrosse, and has a bestie that she’s on the phone with non-stop. And… in some weird, ironic twist of fate, she now gets violently carsick any time we’re in the car longer than thirty minutes.

And because I’ve done the thing where you bring another human into the world and have to stop making decisions solely based on my own desires, life is different. But also… gas prices right now? Nah. Fuck that.

I’ve been enjoying exercise at the gym. I hang out at the same queer bar with the same people every week (and that’s comforting), drive my kid around to her activities, and look for any opportunity I can to sit around reading, writing, and talking about it. I now have a hobby that takes up space, and I want to get back to dogs, gardens and chickens. If you would have told 33-year-old me that 48-year-old me would look like this, I would have laughed at you as I picked up my backpack and headed to the next destination.

I just got back from a month in Mexico and while some people would give their eye teeth for that experience (which is kind of what I did), give props to anyone you meet who’s moving through the world in a second language, because managing a limited vocabulary and constantly trying to bend it to your will is exhausting. Constantly wondering if I’m going to get Covid or make a bad decision about street food is exhausting. Being treated like a walking dollar sign is exhausting. Haggling for everything is exhausting. Drowning out the noise of other people in a hostel is exhausting. 83-degrees-feels-like-100-because-of-the-humidity is exhausting. Been there. Done it. Tired of it.

I was ready to leave pretty much the moment they finished drilling into my skull, and more than ever before, I missed my family and couldn’t wait to get home and be with them again. Was it Covid that did this to me? Age? Or perhaps it’s just this: at a certain age, I started to reach the end of my supply of fucks to give. I’ve seen and experienced more than a lot of people ever will in a lifetime, but I’ve never really been home. That’s the next experience I want to have.

Hey you kids, get off my lawn.

So hey, all of a sudden a few days ago a lot of people started reading this story. I have literally no idea how people found their way here, but I’d love to — if you’d be so kind to drop a comment and let me know, I’d love that!

Dori Mondon fixes typos for a living and is an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith College, where she is an American Studies major with a focus on public history and creative writing. She currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her 11-year-old daughter and a teeny chiweenie with a very big attitude.