My One-Woman Bachelorette Party

No shots, no penis hats, no friends: just me and a notebook and a wide open schedule

I don't think it's possible for anybody to truly be ready to become a parent, but I do believe it's possible to be ready to no longer be pregnant. No matter how uneventful the pregnancy, there's just a point where it's fucking uncomfortable. One month out from my due date, I can confidently say I've arrived. Get this baby out of me.

The baby hanging out in my uterus elicits the same feeling as an old friend who asked if they could crash on your couch for a few days, but now it's several weeks later and this person has taken over half your fridge and kicks off every morning by taking a 45-minute shit in your bathroom at the same time you normally shower. I'm tired of it, Josh is probably tired of hearing about how tired I am of it (although he hasn't said anything to that effect, because he's smart).

I've been spending a lot of time on my couch thinking, one of the only activities available to me that isn't more physically uncomfortable now. I've been thinking about how, even though there are things I won't be able to do as much anymore, there are things that I'm very glad I prioritized before my brain and body decided it was time to partner off and reproduce. One of those is traveling alone.

I would always travel home from college alone, a 10 hour drive from South Bend, Indiana to Frederic, Wisconsin, because my hometown is in the middle of nowhere and I didn't go to college with anybody who grew up in the area. I'd drive home alone when I lived in Chicago. But I didn't travel with a solo destination until I was 30, when I flew from New York to Chicago to run the marathon. I stayed in my own hotel room, ate meals by myself. I'd never done that before. After that, I traveled by myself when I could afford it and when it fit into my schedule.

My husband and I met and got married "late in life" (a phrase that is in the "geriatric pregnancy" school of sounding old fashioned as hell). When we were planning our wedding-- a wedding that would eventually have to be totally scrapped due to the COVID pandemic, but, another story for another time-- I felt weird about having a "traditional" bachelorette party. After you hit 32 or so, getting people your age together requires too much schedule coordination. Once you're in your late 30's, asking several people for a weekend of their time is a pretty big ask. Most of the friends I've had the longest are married with kids and mortgages and grown up jobs that, unlike me, they cannot do from bed or a stretch of interstate in Utah with good enough cell service to hotspot. They're spread out across the country. I was already planning on seeing all of them in the same place for the actual wedding. I didn't need to force them to travel twice in a year for me.

I also felt like most of the partying traditionally associated with bachelorette parties was already out of my system. There was a time when the sight of a goldfish bowl containing a neon cocktail with a screamingly unsubtle name like Menage a Vodka or Sloppy Sevenths would have made my eyes light up like the glow in the dark necklace the Hawaiian shirt-wearing bartender who made the drink was handing out. That time was the years 2004-2007, and then again for a few months after a difficult breakup in 2013. That time has passed. My liver cannot take it anymore.

I came to the conclusion that the most fitting way to give my unmarried self a proper sendoff was a solo trip: just me, with a regular-sized drink and a notebook, on a balcony looking at water of some kind.

I wanted my solo bachelorette weekend to be a place I'd never been, a place with the necessary infrastructure to accommodate tourists without my presence being obnoxious, a place where travel as a solo woman was relatively safe, a place that was within a half-day's travel.

Ultimately, I picked Los Cabos, Mexico. I found a little boutique hotel right on the beach. The average age of the hotel guests was probably 65, which was perfect because that demographic tends to go to bed early and wake up early, exactly my style when I travel by myself. I spent my days doing whatever I wanted. I rented a little car and drove it up to a town a couple hours north to visit a place where local residents collect sea turtle eggs and release the hatchlings into the water under their supervision while the sun sets. I ate a lot of good food and lingered with a notebook, writing stuff that turned out to be absolute crap when I went back to read it later, but felt good to write down anyway. I walked down the beach while the sun was coming up and met an old man who had a dozen dogs, all of whom had originally been street dogs. I found a popular-enough-but-not-too-popular day hike and climbed around on some rocks. I barely talked to anybody. Nobody asked me for anything. I did not have to incorporate anybody else's preferences into my diet or schedule. Josh and I checked in with each other occasionally so the other wouldn't worry.

On the morning I left, one of my hotel's boomer guests struck up a conversation with me. He asked me where I was from. I said Los Angeles. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was just finishing up my bachelorette weekend. He asked me where my friends were. I lied they were back in the room, because I've spent enough sick days shamewatching Nancy Grace to know that telling people you're traveling alone when you're alone is a good way to end up getting robbed or worse. (The one downside of traveling alone is that a percentage of the brain's CPU must always be attuned to the fact that bad people might target you, and that it's impossible to tell by looking at somebody whether or not they are bad. But once you get used to that...)

A few weeks later, the US went into lockdown over the COVID pandemic and all of the plans that I thought I'd made for the year 2020 vaporized. I haven't had a chance to travel solo since, and, a month out from having a baby, I can't predict, realistically, when it will be feasible to travel alone again.

I think back on my solo bachelorette party, and all of the solo trips before that. I think about stretching out on a hotel bed like a starfish--sleeping diagonally, like a goddamn king-- wandering around a strange town with no agenda, enjoying a coffee in silence. I second-guess and regret a lot of time I think that I wasted or mishandled, but I have never looked back on a trip I've taken by myself and thought, that was stupid.

It's not that I prefer being alone; Josh and I are well-matched travel partners, and I'm excited for our upcoming years of family trips. It's just that there are sporadic windows of time when traveling solo is possible (for those lucky enough to have those windows appear at all), and once those are gone, they're gone. I'm glad that I took advantage of those chances in my own life. Once this baby is here, true alone time will be hard to come by.

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