I am here.

Not only is the woman on this motorcycle carrying a baby, she's nursing him as he rides. Moms multitask everywhere, y'all.

The day I landed in Managua this August, carrying the two big suitcases that would sustain my son and I for four months, my husband Rob eased our rental car out onto highway traffic and I thought, "No way can I do this."

Back home in Connecticut I'd talked a big game of learning how to drive stick shift to keep rental costs down and spending weekends all over the country, revisiting my former life. Now, as couples zipped by on motorcycles and huge SUVs dodged skinny horses pulling carts, that seemed hopelessly naive. I'm a nervous and not-particularly-skillful driver even on the staid streets of suburban New Haven: I didn't learn to drive until I was 36, and ten years later it's still not entirely natural to me. Now, I was going around a Managua roundabout with crossed fingers and my heart in my mouth. And that was with Rob—super competent husband, enabler and right hand man—at the wheel. Manual? Hah. The world's largest and most computer equipt SUV wouldn't have made me feel confident. I'm not sure I can do justice to the "Oh shit, I've made a huge mistake" panic I felt. Especially since—awkwardness alert—this whole crazy experience was my big (and largely unwelcome) idea.

I'd been harassing Rob about letting me take our son D to spend a school semester in Nicaragua for a couple years. I’d spent the half of my childhood in Managua, just about, before the war forced my family to become immigrants to the United States. Now, my son was just about the age that I’d been when I left, and I had a million reasons why it would be good for him to spend a few months in the mother country, from improving his Spanish, to exposing him to an international school, to introducing him to the joys of pinolillo, tropical fruit and undeveloped beaches. I wanted to expose him to the wild and jaunty world that had been mine—maybe have him run around the neighborhood until lights went out, or bounce along in the back of a pick-up.

I also had more selfish reasons. I’d left my country without knowing I was saying good-bye: As far as I was concerned, when I left in June 1979, it was for a short vacation In Key West, FL. But about a month later, Managua fell to the Sandinistas, and my family became refugees. That before-and-after became a rent that shaped my life and my character, in both positive and oh-so-not ways. My American life had been very good to me: I’d grown up, built a career as a writer and editor, married, had a son so American that he was born on Flag Day. But still, I carried around a shadow life, a sense of loss, and an anger, if I’m honest, at a what-if I just couldn’t shake. I remember the years before and right after leaving with the clarity of film and the weight of an origin myth. Which was why, as my son reached those same years, I was amazed at what a small vessel he still was, how moldable, how much really still a child. Against all evidence to the contrary, this was not how I remembered myself, but apparently the main events in my life had happened before I could even suss out an unreliable narrator in a big-text chapter book.

I was, by that time, a freelance writer, so theoretically could work anywhere. And there was a project I’d been wanting to work on for a while. (The Nicaragua Project, which most of this site is devoted to.) So I mounted a campaign to convince my husband and—two years later—here we were.

Rob, driving.

D, reading in the back seat.

Me: Suddenly terrified, not at all sure I could even get around, much less make it through four months.