| |  Creative direction by Sara Haile. Photo by Austin Taylor. Copyright 2018. All rights reserved. | Kelis Rogers, better known as just Kelis, has been New York music royalty ever since her 1999 single “Caught Out There” (we’ll never forget her blonde and magenta curls as she screamed into our TV screens in the music video). But fast-forward two decades, and the alt-R&B queen, who has six albums under her belt and has collaborated with icons like Busta Rhymes and Björk, is now making major moves in the culinary world. The truth is, the marriage of food and music was always present in her artistry, like in 2003’s Tasty, which featured the monster hit “Milkshake,” and 2014’s Food, including the singles “Jerk Ribs,” “Breakfast,” “Cobbler,” and “Friday Fish Fry.” On the latter, Kelis sounds mature and sultry: it’s a grown woman’s tale of love and her gastronomic desires. Kelis is a native Harlemite born to an African-American jazz-musician father and a Chinese-Puerto Rican mother who owned a catering business — so food and music are in her DNA. Thinking back on her early food memories, Kelis recalls neighborhood spots like a Jamaican hole-in-the-wall that made the “most ridiculous coco bread every morning”; Georgie’s Donuts (“Hands down the best freaking doughnuts of all time”); and Better Krust for its “ridiculous” pies. As for her own cooking, Kelis’s Afro-Latinx roots have come to define her understanding of food. “My mom used to make us pernil, which is a Puerto Rican roast pork, and mofongo — you know, all the good stuff.” But Kelis is also influenced by the abundance of fresh ingredients she has access to at her new home in Los Angeles. “California cuisine is a whole other thing that doesn’t exist in New York,” she says. “I love that we’re so close to farms and we have access to good-quality produce. And we’re on the coast, so there is tons of seafood. You kind of have a little bit of everything.” These advantages to the Los Angeles food scene are vital to her culinary ethos and help her instill healthy eating habits for her two young boys. Kelis’s cooking approach is loud and vibrant, just like her music. A maximalist in both food and personal style, she loves seeing colors and textures balanced out on a plate. She’s traveled the world for the past 20 years — so Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean flavors pop up in her recipes, like pork belly with ají and tostones, habañero turkey burgers, duck fried quinoa, and Vietnamese bánh mì meatballs. Kelis’s professional foray into food began in 2009. After a decade in the music business, free from her record label and with no team to answer to, she enrolled in the famed Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. She studied sauces and graduated as a trained saucier. In the past few years, she’s taken bold steps in her blossoming career, first with her show Saucy and Sweet on the Cooking Channel, which coincided with her 2014 album Food, then with her cookbook My Life on a Plate in 2015. In 2016, she created a lot of buzz when she partnered with Andy Taylor, of the duo Le Bun, the London-based French-American burger purveyors, for a pop-up restaurant at Soho’s Leicester House hotel. For the two-week-long collaboration, Kelis and Taylor melded their palates with such dishes as a truffle-ají cheeseburger, sea-bass ceviche, and a variety of Venezuelan arepas. Now Kelis is focusing on her sauce line Bounty & Full, which launched in 2015. Her blends use natural ingredients to create “an accoutrement to the dish,” she says. During her Le Cordon Bleu days, sauces were what most excited her. She strongly connected them to people and their cultures, ethnicities, and characters. And with creations like her signature jerk sauce, pineapple-saffron and ginger-sesame glazes, wild-cherry BBQ sauce, and a cranberry-mandarin jam, it’s clear that sauces are her smartest asset in her burgeoning food empire. Kelis continues to make her mark in the food space, partnering with brands like Airbnb, Puma, Ford, and Spotify for curated food experiences. For a recent Spotify dinner, Kelis served up dynamic pairings like coconut-crab soup, beef curry with roti tisu, and beet-infused corn cakes. And she has even more on her plate for 2018: Bounty & Full is now in supermarkets across the nation, including Key Foods, Safeway, and Target; her cooking line will debut early this year on HSN; and she’s working on opening a farm-to-table restaurant in Malibu. She’s more ready than ever to invite people in, sharing photos on Instagram of musical peers like Kelly Rowland, Sean Paul, and R&B singer Mario joining together at her table. “I think music is really selfish, and food is the total opposite,” she says. “When I create music, I’m creating it for myself. With food, you want to break bread with people, you want to nourish people, you want to love people. It’s a different thing; it’s not about me.” Now, check out an exclusive recipe from Kelis: Coconut Jerk Purple Potato Serves 2 to 4 Ingredients: –32 ounces water
–1 teaspoon salt
–A pound and a half of purple finger potatoes
–2 tablespoons coconut oil
–Half a jar of Bounty & Full Jerk Sauce
–1 can Thai coconut milk Instructions: Step 1: Boil water, and add 1 teaspoon salt. Step 2: Cut the purple potatoes horizontally, and boil them until they are easily pierced with a fork. Step 3: Strain your potatoes, disposing of all the water. Step 4: Add coconut oil to a skillet and heat. Step 5: Put your boiled, sliced potatoes in the skillet face down. Let them cook until crispy. Step 6: Add Bounty & Full Jerk Sauce, and thoroughly mix it in. Step 7: Add coconut milk. Mix everything together until blended. Step 8: You are now ready to serve. Jasmin Hernandez is a Latinx arts and culture writer born and bred in New York City. She is the founder of the intersectional platform Gallery Gurls, which celebrates women, POC, and QTPOC in the art world. Her writing about contemporary female artists has been published in Elle, Vice, Cultured, and Konbini, among others. | | | | |  Illustration by Anna Pipes | Presented by NEO.LIFE Renata Moreira’s one-year-old daughter is just beginning to talk. She calls Renata “Mommy,” her other mother, Lori, Renata’s ex-wife and co-parent, “Mama,” and the man who donated the sperm that gave her life “Duncle,” short for “donor uncle.” The couple’s sperm donor is Renata’s younger brother. “I frankly never contemplated having kids because I didn’t have any role models,” Moreira begins as she tells her daughter’s origin story. But when she met Lori at a bar in New York in 2013, the gay-marriage movement was in full swing. When the couple decided to marry, they saw many of their friends starting families because of the new legal protections that marriage offered LGBTQ families, and they, too, began thinking about their options. After months of research and thinking about the values that were most important to their family, they decided that a genetic connection to their kid was a high priority. “It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in adoption,” says Moreira, who is the executive director of Our Family Coalition, a nonprofit that works to advance equity for LGBTQ families. “But the idea was that we wanted a child that was related to our ancestors and the genetic code that carries.” Moreira is Brazilian, of indigenous and Portuguese ancestry, and Lori is Italian. Given that they both wanted to carry on their genetic heritage, they asked Renata’s brother to donate his sperm, to be matched with Lori’s eggs. The family’s fertility doctor used in-vitro fertilization to conceive an embryo in a dish and implanted it into Moreira’s uterus, making her into her daughter’s “gestational carrier.” Even as the social stigma around gay parenting lessens — the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that as many as six million Americans have a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender parent — LGBTQ families that want a biological connection to their children have a lot to think about. A same-sex couple who make a baby must work through an arduous puzzle of personal values, technologies, and intermediary fertility doctors, egg and sperm donors, or surrogates. But that could change dramatically before long. A developing technology known as IVG, short for in-vitro gametogenesis, could make it possible for same-sex couples to conceive a baby out of their own genetic material and no one else’s. They’d do this by having cells in their own bodies turned into sperm or egg cells. The science of IVG has been underway for the past twenty years. But it really took off with research that would later win a Nobel Prize for a Japanese scientist named Shinya Yamanaka. In 2006, he found a way to turn any cell in the human body, even easy-to-harvest ones like skin and blood cells, into cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which can be reprogrammed to become any cell in the body. Until that breakthrough, scientists working in regenerative medicine had to use more limited — and controversial — stem cells derived from frozen human embryos. In 2016, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan announced that they had turned cells from a mouse’s tail into iPS cells and then made those into eggs that went on to gestate into pups. There are a lot of steps that still need to be perfected before this process of creating sex cells, also known as gametes, could work in humans. If it does work, the first application likely would be in reversing infertility: men would have new sperm made and women would have new eggs made from other cells in their bodies. But a more mind-bending trick is also possible: that cells from a man could be turned into egg cells and cells from a woman could be turned into sperm cells. And that would be an even bigger leap in reproductive medicine than in-vitro fertilization. It would alter our concept of family in ways we are only beginning to imagine. Sex Cells! There is now a small international group of scientists racing to re-create the mouse formula and reprogram human iPS cells into sperm and egg cells. One of the key players is Amander Clark, a stem-cell biologist at UCLA. On a Friday afternoon, she walks me through her open lab area and introduces Di Chen, a postdoctoral fellow from China who’s working on creating artificial gametes. We enter a small room with a microscope, a refrigerator incubator, and a biosafety cabinet where students work with iPS cells. Chen invites me to peer down the microscope and shows off a colony of fresh iPS cells. They look like a large amoeba. Getting cells like these to become viable eggs or sperm requires six major steps, Clark says. All of them have been accomplished in a mouse, but doing it in a human will be no easy feat. (In 2016, scientists reported that they had turned human skin cells into sperm cells, a development that Clark calls “interesting — but no one has repeated it yet.”) And no one has yet made an artificial human egg. Clark and other labs are essentially stuck on step three. After the steps in which a cell from the body is turned into an iPS cell, the third step is to coax it into an early precursor of a germ cell. For the work in mice, one Japanese researcher, Katsuhiko Hayashi, combined a precursor cell with cells from embryonic ovaries — ovaries at the very beginning of development — which were taken from a different mouse at day twelve in its gestation. This eventually formed an artificial ovary that produced a cell that underwent sex-specific differentiation (step four) and meiosis (step five) and became a gamete (step six). Other researchers, Azim Surani at Cambridge and Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have gotten to step three with both human embryonic stem cells and iPS cells, turning them into precursors that can give rise to either eggs or sperm. Surani’s former student Mitinori Saitou, now at Kyoto University, also accomplished this biological feat. It’s an impressive achievement: they’ve made something that normally develops around day seventeen of gestation in a human embryo. But the next step, growing these precursor cells into mature eggs and sperm, is “a very, very huge challenge,” Surani says. It will require scientists to re-create a process that takes almost a year in natural human development. And in humans they can’t take the shortcut used in mice, taking embryonic ovary cells from a different mouse. At UCLA, Clark refers to the next three steps needed to get to a human artificial gamete as “the maturation bottleneck.” Those amoeba-like iPS cells that Chen showed me are sitting in a dish that he lifts off the microscope and carries to the biosafety cabinet. There he separates the cells into a new dish and adds a liquid with proteins and other ingredients to help the cells grow. He puts the cells into an incubator for one day; then he’ll collect the cells again and add more ingredients. After around four days, the cells ideally will have grown into a ball that is around the size of a grain of sand, visible to the naked eye. This ball contains the precursors to a gamete. Clark’s lab and other international teams are studying it to understand its properties, with the hope that it will offer clues to getting all the way to step six — an artificial human gamete. “I do think we’re less than ten years away from making research-grade gametes,” she says. Commercializing the technology would take longer, and no one can really predict how much so — or what it would possibly cost. Even then, same-sex reproduction will face one more biological hurdle: scientists would need to somehow make a cell derived from a woman, who has two X chromosomes, into a sperm cell with one X and one Y chromosome, and do the reverse, turning an XY male cell into an XX female egg cell. Whether both steps are feasible has been debated for at least a decade. Ten years ago, the Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem cells, ethics, and law, predicted that making sperm from female cells would be “difficult, or even impossible.” But gene editing and various cellular-engineering technologies might be increasing the likelihood of a work-around. In 2015, two British researchers reported that women could “in theory have offspring together” by injecting genetic material from one partner into an egg from the other. With this method, the children would all be girls, “as there would be no Y chromosomes involved.” Yet another possibility: a single woman might even be able to reproduce by herself in a human version of parthenogenesis, which means “virgin birth.” It could be the feminist version of the goddess Athena springing from Zeus’s head. The Genderqueer Nuclear Family The question remains whether society will want this technology — and how often LGBTQ families will choose to use it. Current advanced reproductive technologies are already diversifying the ways we reproduce and opening reproduction to groups who previously may not have had access to it. This is expanding the concept of family beyond the traditional Ozzie and Harriet hetero-nuclear family. Many people who are single parents by choice now include their gamete donors as family members. Many LGBTQ families are collaborations of friends and relatives who become egg and sperm donors and help raise the kids. So it’s understandable that social and legal observers are already thinking about the potential consequences of artificial gametes for the shape of families. If the technology means that lesbian couples wouldn’t need a sperm donor and gay male couples wouldn’t need a donor egg or surrogate to carry the baby, it could, among other things, make it “easier for the intended parents to preserve the integrity and privacy of the family unit,” Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the Journal of Law and Biosciences. Ironically, however, the technology also could create something rather conventional — a biological nuclear family, albeit one that looks more like Ozzie and Ozzie. “Collaborative reproduction has paved the way for radical new definitions of family, which really helped to lead the movement for marriage equality,” says Radhika Rao, a law professor at UC Hastings Law School. “Instead of challenging heteronormative values, IVG could end up perpetuating them.” That’s why Renata Moreira isn’t sure she would have chosen it. “It might take away from this great opportunity to challenge and expand the notion of what family looks like,” she says. But new reproductive technologies are invented to expand our choices more than to limit them, as egg freezing and IVF allow women to pause and extend their biological clocks. In the coming decades, IVG could let us bend biology to bring together the genetic codes, as Moreira puts it, of people who otherwise can’t. This would increase the freedom to shape our families to meet our personal values and desires, and push human evolution in an altogether new direction. This story is presented by NEO.LIFE, which gives you a front-row seat to our neobiological future, including stories on how to use the latest research to live a longer, happier, healthier life. NEO.LIFE’s beats include neuroscience, genetics, food, the microbiome, longevity, fertility, digital health, sex, death, and more. Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is the editor of The ART and Science of Family and author of In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family. | | | | |  Illustration by Zoe van Dijk | While you were toasting to better times (or drowning in your sorrows), there’s been a quiet shake-up in distilling. Traditionally male-dominated, the spirits world is putting more women in charge of making the liquors you drink. The spirits industries and individual houses vary on how they grant titles, but typically "master distiller" and "master blender" are awarded to those who've had years of hands-on experience in distilleries and at least some college education (usually in chemistry). Each industry has its own certification and tasting boards, too. Thus how one moves up within the ranks to become a master distiller or a master blender is specific not only to each spirits sector but also to each spirits house. Many of the world’s best-known spirits houses were founded by men, who often anointed other male colleagues as master distillers and blenders when they stepped down, setting up generations of male leadership. But things are finally changing. Last fall, Bombay Sapphire hired Dr. Ann Brock, who has a PhD in organic chemistry, as its master distiller. She joins a rarefied but growing demographic of female master distillers and blenders. Lesley Gracie, who joined William Grant & Sons in 1988, is credited with creating the Hendrick’s Gin recipe in 1999. Gracie is still master distiller for Hendrick’s, where she is one of just five people in the world who know how Hendrick’s is made. At Dewar's, master blender Stephanie MacLeod crafts all that Scotch, while in Jamaica, you’ll find Joy Spence, the celebrated master blender for Appleton Estate rum. (Spence, incidentally, is the first woman in the spirits industry to hold a master-blender title, according to Campari Group, which owns Appleton Estate.) Jassil Villanueva Quintana is the first female head distiller for Brugal Rum; in 2015, she became the youngest master of rum, at age 28. And then there’s Ana Maria Romero Mena. In 2007, Romero Mena published The Aromas of Tequila: The Art of Tasting, which identifies the various sensory notes found in tequila and explains how each scent develops. Following the publication of her book, she established a tequila-focused consultancy through which she would teach people about the various aromas in tequila and how they develop through distilling. It takes several steps to turn raw agave into sipping tequila. Each tequila house makes choices — what part of the country the agave is sourced from, how it is cooked, how distillers finish the liquid — that impact the final spirit in the glass. As part of her research into aromas and tasting notes, Romero Mena visited every tequila house, large and small, to document all the subtle variations between styles. She identified over 600 individual scents (such as peach, cherry, and banana) that she mapped onto an aroma wheel, which was adopted by the industry. Romero Mena is also a maestra tequilera, someone who oversees the entire tequila process from start to finish. (Think of it as a combination of master distiller plus master blender.) So when Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy decided it was time to create its very first tequila, Volcan de Mi Tierra, it makes sense that it came to her. “She's seen all styles of approaches and projects,” Volcan de Mi Tierra CEO Trent Fraser says. “From a consultancy basis, working with these big brands, she’s been steered in a very specific direction. But for the first time, like a great artist, we’ve given her a blank canvas.” So what does a celebrated maestra tequilera do when given resources to create a tequila from scratch? Honor all the rules, then completely break them. Tequila is made from agave that comes from either the lowlands (which gives you more herbal notes) or the highlands (which is more fruity). Tequila-makers will typically pick just one kind of agave for their product. They will also use just one cooking and distilling style. But at Volcan, Romero Mena didn’t pick just one kind of anything. Instead of choosing a highlands agave or a lowlands agave, she used both and created two distillates. Instead of choosing one way to cook down the agave, she opted for multiple methods. She used two kinds of fermentation and distilling. Applying her research in developing the aroma wheel, she crafted a tequila that features a spectrum of tasting notes, not just those specific to one style. In short, she treats tequila like a blended whisky. Blended whiskies, are the combination of a range of liquids, from different grains and even from different producers, that are mixed to arrive at a new product whose whole is better than any singular spirit. “I want to change the minds of my people,” Romero Mena says. “Because people always make the same tequila. In this moment, we have so many variables to make a unique tequila.” Depending on where the agave is grown and how the tequila is processed, a spirit might be either dry with a mineral finish or full of lush and floral notes. Tequila certainly has fans for both kinds of styles. But Romero Mena poses, and answers, the question: “Why not have the best of both worlds?” What makes Volcan singular is that it is made like no other spirit in its category. “When I was studying tequila, the best expressions were from the highlands,” she says. “But we’re betting on also highlighting expressions from the lowlands, which will be another strength.” “Lowlands agave is a lot more sturdy. It’s like agave rawness,” Fraser explains. “With the highlands agave, you get more citrus, floral, and elegance. You can make [a tequila with] one or the other. Ana’s vision was to make a more balanced, rich style of tequila.” “What is the best tequila? How can I design the best profile?” are questions Romero Mena says she asked herself when creating the new tequila. “I want to explore] the highlands agave, and the lowlands agave, and different terroir. I studied the soil character and the pH.” She is sanguine about the expected reaction from her peers. “I believe the first impression will be ‘What?’ And the second one is ‘How do they do it?’” “People will know it’s Volcan,” she predicts. “We have a unique personality.” She shrugs. “I hope they understand my point of view.” Having successfully created two groundbreaking liquids, however, Romero Mena has already moved on from Volcan. She will soon be focusing on new research and innovation initiatives within the industry, but details about her upcoming projects remain vague. One thing is clear: In an industry tied to doing things how they have always been done, Ana Maria Romero Mena is making up her own traditions. Elva Ramirez is a freelance spirits and travel journalist based in Brooklyn. She is the founder of ambianceuse.com. | | | | | .JPG) Photo by Didem Tali | Being a world champion in anything requires immense discipline and training. However, Bum-Erdene Tuvshinjargal, a seventeen-year-old sumo champion from Mongolia, has to hack much more than discipline and training. Tuvshinjargal’s chosen sport technically does not even allow women in the ring. Rooted in ancient Japanese tradition and dating back over 1,500 years, this branch of wrestling considers women “impure.” The sport is based on the sacred Shinto rituals performed for the gods. Until the 19th century, women weren’t even allowed to watch sumo; it was believed that they would desecrate the Samurai ritual — especially if they touched the dohyō, the ring in which sumo bouts are held. Women can now watch or practice sumo on an amateur level (and they prove to be some of the most avid fans worldwide), yet they cannot become professionals. Tuvshinjargal, who fell in love with the sport while watching Japanese wrestlers on television as a child, has always wanted it to be something more. She began practicing sumo in 2015, and since then she has passionately worked toward her goal of excelling in the sport. Tuvshinjargal has already won several international championships, and she has quickly risen up in the amateur league; her coaches believe she has a rare talent for sumo. Despite all of this, Tuvshinjargal cannot expect to become a professional fighter because of her gender. Meanwhile, male sumo wrestlers can make millions a year in the sport. We followed Tuvshinjargal throughout her daily practice in her hometown of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and talked to her about why the sport’s male-centric traditions won’t stand in the way of her dreams of becoming a professional athlete.  Tuvshinjargal entering the sumo gym. Photo by Didem Tali |
After a day at her university as an international communications student, Tuvshinjargal enters her sumo gym. Her training day begins as the sun sets behind the snow-peaked green hills of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital city. For the next several hours, she’ll work on perfecting her fighting technique, as she has for the past two years. .JPG) Photo by Didem Tali |
Recognized as one of the best female sumo wrestlers in the world, Tuvshinjargal won many gold and silver medals in the Asian Games, World Sumo Championships, Mongolian Sumo Championship, and Japanese Women’s Open Competition. However, none of these awards will qualify her to practice professionally, as women’s sumo wrestling exists only as an amateur league. -smaller.gif) Tuvshinjargal stretching before her daily fighting routine. GIF by Didem Tali |
In the past couple of decades, sumo has almost become Mongolia's national sport. To wit: Since 2003, four of the five wrestlers who have become yokozuna (champions who have reached the sport's highest ranking) have been Mongolians. Despite the popularity of the sport, Tuvshinjargal still receives puzzled reactions when she tells people she is a sumo wrestler. “When I say I practice sumo, people get surprised and ask, ‘Is that a sport? Women can participate in that sport?’” she says. “They are surprised, because they don’t know. When I say I am an amateur sumo fighter, people usually go, ‘Wow, is that a thing?’” -smaller.gif) GIF by Didem Tali |
It’s not uncommon for Tuvshinjargal to find herself as the only female in the ring when she is practicing. Hence, she often has practice matches with boys. “I just show them the girl power,” she says, laughing. -smallerr.gif) GIF by Didem Tali |
Despite her demanding schedule as a university student, Tuvshinjargal gets up at 6 a.m. every day to run. The Mongolian capital is the world’s coldest; the temperatures can plummet to negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. She also does yoga before starting to fight in the ring. It helps her to have a clear mind, which she says is important for an athlete. “I think of one thing before going up in the fighting ring: my goal,” she says. “When wrestling, it’s better not to think of anything. If I do, fear and anxiety come with my thoughts.” -smaller.gif) GIF by Didem Tali |
“At first, fighting with boys was a little awkward, but it’s OK now,” Tuvshinjargal says. “During the sumo practice, there should not be such things as, I am a woman: I have to be like this or that,” she explains. “When practicing sumo, gender does not matter,” Tuvshinjargal adds. “I have to focus and pay my full attention to my practice and my goal. That’s what I do.”  Photo by Didem Tali |
Despite all Tuvshinjargal's efforts, it won’t be possible for her to become a professional sumo wrestler in the near future, but she doesn’t feel bitter about it. “I have a backup plan,” she says. “Anyone can achieve any success if they try, whether they are men or women.” Her goal is to become an Olympic athlete. Sumo was her childhood dream, but Tuvshinjargal is not change-averse. Even if she cannot achieve her goal of representing Mongolia at the Olympics as a sumo fighter, she is willing to switch to another branch of wrestling. She knows that the skills she’s learned with sumo will be of value no matter where she takes them. Didem Tali is a freelance journalist based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Follow her at @didem_tali and read her stories at didemtali.com. | | | | |  Illustration by Anita Tung | The hostel I’d booked in Casco Viejo in Panama City was hot, dark, and musty — central, as advertised, and cheap, as expected. In the tiny bathroom, Ben and I had to climb over the toilet to get to the shower. Shower was not an entirely accurate description, since there was no spigot, just a hole in the wall where the water dribbled out, and we had to press ourselves flat against the tiles to try to get wet. These were not tiles you wanted to press yourself against, so the darkness was a bonus. I didn’t really mind the lack of showerhead, the creaking, rusty fan, or the lumpy bed. Who’d want to be stuck indoors when we could be exploring together outside in the sun? We bought salty empanadas in the alleys and cold bottles of Balboa beer. Ben and I toured the towering locks of the Panama Canal, dove murky shipwrecks off both coasts, and visited the empty, powder-white beaches and sweltering, tangled mangroves in the San Blas Islands. One afternoon, we went for a walk around Casco Viejo’s crumbling colonial streets, and Ben spotted a row of white stucco arches in the sunshine: Andean Grand Hotel in gold lettering, with five stars. “Finally,” he said, grinning and charging up the steps without another word. But he returned moments later, with a crumpled expression. Turned out it wasn’t actually a hotel, but a film set for the next James Bond. This was 2008. I was used to traveling on a shoestring. Ben — not so much. *** For more than a decade, I’d traveled and lived all over the world. I’d grown up in California, but after my PhD studying Australian sea lions, I taught marine ecology in the Bahamas and a course on killer whales in the San Juan Islands; I had worked as a science writer in Washington, DC, and as a marine mammal biologist on ships in Antarctica. I could and did go anywhere — the Inca Trail, Borneo, Tasmania, the Amazon — for as cheap and as long as possible. I loved the unexpectedness, the freedom. I’d also fallen for boys all over the world. I loved their accents, the unknown. I’d dated Australians, New Zealanders, a South African, a Frenchman. My brother, a real homebody, kept asking, “Would it kill you, Shan, just once, to go for a Californian?” I met Ben during my second season in Antarctica in 2007. He was from London and had quit his job at IBM to do a degree in polar studies before becoming an assistant expedition leader on the same ship I was working on. Ben was particularly British. He wore sweaters (“jumpers,” to him), drank tea, and said things like “Toodle-oo.” He was tall with hazel eyes and glasses, and he made me laugh. We continued to travel — fellow adventurers — to Uruguay, Cuba, India, and Bhutan. We worked on ships in Arctic Canada and Greenland, eating frozen arctic char and muktuk, and cross-country-skied around scientific bases and remote campsites in the 24-hour sun on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. *** At the end of 2009, we took a train from London to York for the wedding of one of Ben’s best friends from college. I was 35, and we’d been together almost two years. I’d always wanted kids and had just gone off the pill. Ben agreed but didn’t feel the pressure of the clock as I did. He was less enthusiastic, less certain. Our first afternoon in York, Ben and I sat together in a Starbucks and drank lattes as it snowed within the ancient stone walls of the city. I loved him. I wanted us both to be happy. So we came up with a plan. “I think I’d be OK not having kids, if we lived a life less ordinary,” I told him. “A life we couldn’t live with kids. I don’t want to do the rat race in London, buy a big house and fill it with stuff. We’d have to do things that were crazy. Sail around the world. Volunteer in Africa for a year.” “Really? You’re sure?” Mostly I was. More so because he looked so relieved. And we were going to Africa! We spent the days of the rehearsal, wedding, and New Year’s in York discussing possibilities. I had teaching experience and hoped to use my skills as a scientist; Ben had always wanted to go to Madagascar. Or Kenya. Or Tanzania. Meanwhile, I was strangely tired and struggled to stay up as late as he and his friends were. In-jokes from university and high heels on icy cobblestones didn’t help, but I worried everyone would think I was rude when I couldn’t keep my eyes open and headed back to our hotel early. After New Year’s, we returned to our small terrace house in London, to find I’d been accepted to a writing residency in upstate New York for September. Unable to legally work in the UK, I’d started a memoir about a solo journey through Eastern Europe I’d taken years earlier. I was thrilled. But a tiny niggle bobbed to the surface — September was nine months away. Ben made a quick trip to the pharmacy, I peed on a stick, and Africa (and the residency) vanished. So kids would be our next adventure after all. My last Arctic season, I was six months pregnant. We got married on a tiny uninhabited island off Spitsbergen. Three of us stood on the rocky snow-covered beach, wearing life jackets and waterproofs, with rifles slung over our shoulders in case of polar bears. The perfect shotgun wedding. *** Ben and I had three babies in less than five years, and I loved each dimpled thigh, cheeky giggle, and sloppy kiss more than I’d imagined possible. I’d tuck them in at night, say I loved them to the moon and back, and mean it. But it was also harder than I’d imagined possible. I’d never really missed California and my family enough to move back until I had my own children in London. Day after day, year after year, I nursed and fed and wiped and hugged and hardly slept. I wanted to go home. I wanted my kids to grow up eating artichokes and avocados, huevos rancheros and s’mores, surrounded by sandy beaches and redwoods, the Sierra Nevadas and San Francisco, coyotes and banana slugs, barking sea lions and dive-bombing pelicans. I wanted them riding snowboards and skateboards and surfboards, breathing in the salt of the Pacific Ocean. And I wanted my parents around the corner, to drop off the kids so they could play tickle-monster with my dad, go swimming in backyard pools with my nephews, bake cookies with my mum — peanut butter with orange zest and crisscross fork-marks — just as I had when I was little. But Ben’s job, family, and friends were all in the UK. He found California slow; he thought Santa Cruz was weird. He continued to work summers in the Arctic, and the kids and I spent those weeks in California without him. Ben wasn’t interested in traveling with children either. He said we could all hike the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal once the youngest was eight — maybe eleven. He didn’t see the point in going somewhere if we had to navigate naps, high chairs, and meltdowns. But I was going stir crazy changing diapers all day in dark, gray London. Europe was on our doorstep. The world could still be explored with the kids in tow. Occasionally, I was able to talk Ben into it — renting a gîte with a bouncy castle in Normandy and taking all three trick-or-treating in the Channel Islands. But more often, his idea of a holiday was time alone to work on the house. So I took the children to visit friends in Sweden and the Netherlands on my own, and my mum joined the kids and me on trips to Norway, Barbados, and the Canary Islands. *** One night, Ben left. Our oldest was five, the middle had just turned three, and the baby was ten months. It was a shock to me, though we’d both been unhappy for a long time. We were too different as parents, too different from who we’d been. After being together almost nine years, I no longer recognized him. At first, I felt the freedom I expected as a single mum. The house felt bigger, lighter. It was a relief not to have Ben come back pissed off at me and the kids for making his long days even longer. My mum and I booked holidays with the children to Brooklyn and Bath. I took the baby on a girls’ road trip with a neighbor and her daughter through Latvia and Lithuania. After my oldest finished the school year, I thought we might finally move to California. Then I slowly began to understand how few choices I have over my own life. I can’t move back to Santa Cruz; Ben would never allow it, and I wouldn’t take the kids so far from their dad. I can’t keep the house without his cooperation, so I thought we might move to Bristol. The boys need a bigger yard; we’d get away from the capital’s high prices, pollution, and pace. I would have better job prospects. But to move anywhere from the immediate area, I need Ben’s permission. I can’t afford to stay in London, and I’m not allowed to leave. I always used travel to find my place in the world. It wasn’t all freewheeling — my trip through Eastern Europe years ago helped me regain my footing after the sudden death of my fiancé at 25. But now I need Ben’s agreement on school holidays and his consent to take the kids out of the UK, even for a weekend. We’ve been separated almost two years, and it’s become increasingly contentious. I dream of packing up the kids and setting off — spending a year speaking Spanish, swimming through waterfalls, eating asado together somewhere in South America. I dream my kids could have the life less ordinary. But we can’t — I can’t. Not for sixteen years, when my youngest turns eighteen. My parents may no longer be around by the time I can finally move home. My dad is going through a health scare, and I’m trapped, helpless, and isolated. From London, I watch the out-of-control California fires and mudslides on the news. When my family rallies together on the other side of the world, I feel like a stranger in a foreign land. Ben says I knew what I was signing up for when I first moved to the UK all those years ago, in love with the world at my feet. And I knew things would change with children. But I had no idea that our life together would turn out to be only empty promises, like the façade of a James Bond film set, or that I’d have less autonomy as a single mum than as a married one. Of course, I’d trade all my globe-trotting freedoms for three sloppy kisses. There are worse places to be stuck than London, and I’m aware of the privilege of having food on the table and national health care. I’m focusing on everything this city has to offer — public transport, history, theater, museums. I’ll fight to continue to spend our summers in California. And in 2033, I’m taking my kids to the moon and back. Shannon Leone Fowler’s debut memoir, Traveling With Ghosts, is out in paperback from Simon & Schuster. | | | | | | | | |
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