When I was 62, having travelled the world, raised a child and wrapped up my career, I decided to do something I had never seriously considered before. I got married.
My friends and family reacted with shock and awe when I informed them about the upcoming wedding. They had regarded me as single for life. To be fair, while I had boyfriends over the years, the relationships never got to the point of moving in together, or rarely even meeting my family.
As I recount in my memoir, Update: Reporting from an Ancient Land, I came of age during the wave of feminism in the 1970s, when young women were encouraged to pursue careers previously closed to them. My first job was as a reporter for my hometown newspaper, and I went on to work for newspapers abroad, eventually becoming a CNN correspondent based in Cairo and Rome in my early 30s.
Most of my friends were single and thriving, unworried about a then-popular, now-debunked statistic that a single woman was more likely to be in a terrorist attack than to marry after age 40. I actually was in a terrorist attack — the bombing of an empty tourist bus in Egypt — and briefly wondered if the odds had shifted in my favor. But it was an idle thought, not something I desired. On assignment in India, I had my fortune told by a trained parrot that assured me I would get married someday.
I scoffed.
Yet conversely, I always wanted to be a mother. It took more than a year to complete the paperwork required for international adoption. On a cold November day in Moscow, I stood in front of a judge in a courtroom lit by rays of sunlight beaming through high windows. She looked me in the eyes and said gently, “Congratulations. You are a mother.”
I’d expected her to approve my petition to adopt the orphaned baby girl I’d been matched with, but it still felt like a shock. Tears filled my eyes, and I let out an involuntary sob. Just like that, I was a mom.
I eventually left CNN and moved to Washington, DC, where I relished my role as a single mother by choice. My daughter shared my sense of adventure, so we trekked to historical re-enactments, Lego festivals, trade fairs, sheep herding competitions. Sometimes, in our little brick house, I would be reading on my bed, and my daughter would lie next to me with her own book and we would be joined by both of our cats.
I felt safe, like the mattress was a raft floating serenely along with my little family all together.
When I dropped my daughter off for her freshman year of college, I ugly cried the whole way home. Fortunately, though, I had found an additional travel partner — a smart, tall lawyer with a dry wit and a disdain for clutter equal to my own. Our first date was in a bookshop, which seemed somehow apt, a new chapter in my life.
Later that year, we travelled separately to Amsterdam since I needed to arrive in advance to attend a conference. Our flights home were only 20 minutes apart, so we navigated our way together through airport security and then hit a literal wall. He went to one side because his flight connected through Europe, while I was shuffled to the other side with those traveling straight to the United States.