5 Reasons I Still Travel Solo Even Though I’m a Mom

✈️ The Moment I Knew I Had to Go Alone

Standing barefoot on the damp cobblestones of a quiet alley in Oaxaca City at 6:17 a.m., steam rising from a vendor’s tortilla comal, I took my first full breath in three years that wasn’t timed around someone else’s nap schedule, diaper change, or school drop-off. My daughter’s voice still echoed in my head—"Mommy, why can’t I come?"—but my hands were steady as I adjusted my backpack straps and watched the sun bleed gold over Cerro del Fortín. This wasn’t escape. It was recalibration. And it confirmed something I’d quietly suspected since my son started kindergarten: traveling solo—even as a mom—isn’t selfish, unsustainable, or rare. It’s necessary—and deeply possible. What follows isn’t a justification. It’s a record of how five quiet, unglamorous truths reshaped my relationship with distance, time, and self-trust—starting with the realization that my children didn’t need me to be everywhere, all the time.

🌍 The Setup: Three Years of ‘We’

I hadn’t traveled alone since before my second child was born. That trip—a rushed weekend in Portland to attend a friend’s wedding—felt like a relic from another life. After Leo arrived, every itinerary bent around pediatrician appointments, stroller weight limits, and the logistical gravity of packing two car seats, three changes of clothes per child, and enough snacks to survive Armageddon. Family travel became synonymous with coordination: booking hotels with adjoining rooms, verifying crib availability, mapping walkable routes to playgrounds, cross-checking flight times against naps. We visited Costa Rica, Lisbon, and Asheville—all wonderful—but each trip left me emotionally depleted, physically stretched thin, and quietly disoriented. I recognized landmarks, but not myself in them.

By spring 2023, I’d stopped asking, “Where do I want to go?” and defaulted to “Where is feasible?” Feasible meant low-risk, high-convenience, minimal language barriers, and zero tolerance for unpredictability. My husband noticed. One Tuesday, while folding laundry, he said, “You haven’t looked up a bus schedule just for fun in two years.” He wasn’t criticizing. He was naming a silence I’d grown used to.

So when an old colleague invited me to join a small group workshop on traditional textile dyeing in Oaxaca—strictly adult-only, no kids permitted—I hesitated for exactly 47 seconds. Then I opened my calendar, checked school schedules, confirmed backup childcare for six days, and booked a flight. Not because I craved adventure, but because I missed the sensation of making a decision without running it through three layers of approval—mine, my partner’s, and my children’s.

🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Didn’t Match the Mood

Oaxaca welcomed me with humidity so thick it clung to my skin like wet gauze. My Airbnb host, Doña Luz, pressed a cup of atole into my hands—warm, cinnamon-sweet, faintly gritty—and pointed to a hand-drawn map taped to the fridge. "Caminar. No correr," she said. "Walk. Don’t rush." I nodded, grateful, then spent the next two hours trying to locate the Mercado 20 de Noviembre using Google Maps—which insisted the market was three blocks east, while Doña Luz’s map placed it two blocks west and slightly uphill.

I walked east. Got lost. Turned back. Walked west. Got lost again. Sat on a curb, heart pounding—not from exertion, but from the sudden, dizzying awareness that I had no one to consult. No partner to say, “Let’s try the other way,” no child to distract me with a question about pigeons. Just me, a paper map, and the slow, insistent rhythm of church bells counting off the hour. In that moment, panic flickered—not about safety, but about competence. Had I forgotten how to navigate ambiguity? Was I actually less capable now, or just out of practice?

Then an elderly woman selling chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) smiled, tapped my map, and traced a route with her finger: "Por aquí. Pero despacio. El mercado respira al mediodía." (“This way. But slowly. The market breathes at noon.”) She didn’t give directions. She gave permission—to pause, to observe, to let the city reveal itself on its own terms. I followed her finger. Found the market. Bought a bag of grasshoppers. Ate one. Crunched. Laughed out loud—alone, unrecorded, unedited.

📸 The Discovery: People Who Saw Me, Not My Role

Solo travel didn’t erase motherhood. It simply made space for other versions of me to surface—versions that hadn’t been invited to the table in years. At the workshop, I sat beside Elena, a Zapotec weaver from Teotitlán del Valle who taught us how to coax color from cochineal insects and wild marigolds. She never asked about my kids. She asked, "What shade of red makes your chest open?" Later, sharing lunch on her rooftop terrace, she gestured toward the valley below and said, "My daughters travel alone now too. Not because they must—but because they know themselves well enough to listen to the road."

That phrase—listen to the road—stuck. I began noticing how often I’d stopped listening: to my own fatigue, my curiosity about architecture versus food, my preference for early mornings over late nights. On the bus to Mitla, I struck up a conversation with a university student researching colonial-era murals. We debated mural restoration ethics for 90 minutes—no baby talk, no code-switching, no mental calculation of how long until the next bathroom stop. I felt intellectually agile again. Not sharp, not brilliant—just present.

One rainy afternoon, holed up in Café Sotavento reading García Márquez, I watched rain blur the stained-glass windows and realized: I wasn’t waiting for anything. Not for a child to fall asleep. Not for a partner to finish a call. Not for a moment to be “right.” I was simply occupying time—fully, without debt or deficit. That neutrality felt revolutionary.

🚂 The Journey Continues: Small Acts of Reclamation

Solo travel didn’t mean solitude at all times. It meant choosing connection on my own terms. I shared tamales with a group of Dutch cyclists in Tlacolula, helped an American photographer carry gear up Monte Albán’s steep southern slope, and spent an hour watching street vendors shape clay pots outside San Bartolo Coyotepec—no agenda, no photos, just attention. Each interaction was lighter because there was no performative layer: no need to explain my kids’ allergies, no pressure to make small talk “for the sake of the children,” no reflexive apology for being tired.

Practically, I learned fast: Carry a lightweight rain jacket (Oaxaca’s showers are frequent and fierce), book accommodations with 24-hour reception (so late arrivals aren’t stressful), and always have local cash—ATMs in smaller towns may run low or require specific cards. I also discovered that “solo” didn’t mean “unassisted.” When my phone died mid-afternoon near Hierve el Agua, a local guide named Javier offered to charge it in his truck while I waited—no fee, no expectation. "You’re here to see the petrified water," he said, nodding toward the mineral cascades. "Not to fix your battery."

Back in Oaxaca City, I bought a small notebook. Not for logistics, but for sensory fragments: the smell of wet adobe after rain, the weight of a hand-spun wool shawl, the exact pitch of the bell at Santo Domingo at 7 p.m. I filled six pages—not because I planned to publish them, but because recording them made me feel anchored in my own perception. For the first time in years, my memory wasn’t filtered through a child’s lens or a partner’s commentary. It was mine, raw and unmediated.

🌅 Reflection: What Traveling Solo Taught Me About Motherhood

I returned home with sun-bleached hair, a suitcase smelling of copal incense and dried chiles, and two children who hugged me fiercely—then immediately asked if I brought back chapulines. They didn’t ask what I’d learned. They asked about snacks. And that, perhaps, was the clearest signal of all: my absence hadn’t fractured anything. It had simply created space for new stories—mine and theirs.

Motherhood had trained me to anticipate, buffer, and absorb. Solo travel demanded the opposite: to release control, tolerate uncertainty, and trust my own judgment without external validation. I hadn’t become a different person. I’d remembered one I’d set aside—not permanently, but temporarily, like folding a favorite sweater into the back of a drawer. The version of me who reads maps slowly, asks questions without fearing they’re naive, sits with silence without filling it—she wasn’t gone. She was just waiting for me to choose her again.

And here’s what surprised me most: my children didn’t miss me less because I’d gone away. They missed me more precisely—because I came back fuller, quieter, less reactive. I listened longer. I paused before answering. I said “I don’t know” more freely. That shift wasn’t dramatic. It was granular. Like noticing how the light hit my son’s eyelashes differently one morning—and realizing I hadn’t truly seen them in months.

📝 Practical Takeaways: What This Trip Taught Me About Planning Solo Travel as a Parent

None of this worked because I’m exceptional. It worked because I treated solo travel like any other skill—learnable, iterative, and grounded in preparation, not perfection. Here’s what actually mattered:

• Start micro. My first solo trip was six days—not six weeks. I chose a country where I spoke functional Spanish, stayed in a neighborhood with reliable Wi-Fi and walkable amenities, and booked a workshop with built-in structure. Low stakes built confidence.
• Communicate boundaries clearly—not just with kids, but with yourself. I told my children: "I’ll call every evening at 7 p.m., and I’ll send one photo a day. But I won’t check email between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.—that’s my time to learn." I kept that promise. So did they.
• Build redundancy, not rigidity. Instead of one childcare plan, I had three: my partner, my sister (who lives nearby), and a trusted neighbor with CPR training. I shared emergency contacts, medical info, and a daily check-in schedule with all three. Flexibility reduced anxiety far more than perfect planning ever could.
• Carry a physical map—and use it. Digital tools failed me twice. Paper didn’t. I now keep a folded Oaxaca city map in my wallet, annotated with cafés, pharmacies, and bus stops. It’s not nostalgic. It’s pragmatic.

Most importantly: I stopped framing solo travel as a luxury or reward. It’s maintenance. Like changing the oil in a car you rely on daily. You don’t wait until it breaks down to service it.

⭐ Conclusion: The Quiet Power of Choosing Yourself

I used to think traveling solo meant proving something—that I could do it, survive it, master it. Now I understand it’s not about proving. It’s about returning. Returning to the rhythm of my own footsteps. Returning to the certainty that my presence matters—not just as a mother, but as a person who walks, observes, questions, and rests without explanation.

My children are seven and ten now. They’ve started asking, "Can I go to Paris alone when I’m sixteen?" I don’t deflect. I say, "Yes—if you know how to read a metro map, carry cash safely, and trust your gut when something feels off. Let’s practice." We study Paris metro maps together. We role-play asking for directions in French. We talk about what “feeling off” sounds like in your body. Because the lesson isn’t just for them. It’s for me, too: the courage to travel solo as a mom isn’t found in distance—it’s forged in the daily, deliberate choice to honor your own compass.