I Took My Mom To The Grand Canyon. What I Really Saw Was Her.

It’s 5 in the morning, and my mom and I are on the way to the airport. In my early-hours exhaustion, I try to remember the last time we traveled anywhere together, just the two of us, and realize I’m not sure we ever have. But when I’d gotten an email about a road trip to the Grand Canyon, my mom was the first person to pop into my head.

Growing up, travel wasn’t always available to us. As a single parent raising three kids, my mom had to work hard. She also somehow managed to always make us incredible home-cooked meals and attend almost every sporting event and academic ceremony and, in short, be a mom who seemingly made magic out of the tiny slivers of free time she found.

I’d always dreamed of one day being able to take her to some of the places I know she sacrificed seeing to make sure my brother, sister, and I had a beautiful childhood. Fast forward a few decades and there we were, driving to the Grand Canyon. Or flying to Phoenix and then driving to the Grand Canyon, and then to Flagstaff, and then across the desert to Las Vegas. Four days, a mini-tour of Hampton by Hilton hotel stays (give us a waffle bar any day), one rental car, and roughly 12 hours of highway to burn.

Along the way, I got to meet my mom.

None of us remember the moment we originally met our mothers, an introduction made as blurry-eyed babies staring up at the clay from which we were molded. So it’s a wonderful thing to meet her, to truly get to know her, later in life. It’s easy to see her more clearly through the lens of shared lived experience when you’re also a mother.

One of the things I discovered was that my mom is a genuinely excellent passenger. A top-tier co-navigator. She cued up playlists, pulled snacks out of the cooler, and made sure we stretched our legs every so often (“We don’t want to get blood clots, JuJu!”).

I would ask her to take videos of the fleeting landscape for me as I drove, and she would narrate every one. I told her it wasn’t necessary, that most of the videos would probably be used with voiceovers, but she did it anyway. I joked with her about it, but now I look at her play-by-plays as tiny time capsules, something I can listen to forever and let my kids and their kids listen to, too.

Somewhere north of Phoenix, the saguaros started thinning out. The road began climbing toward Sedona, where the color of everything shifted from beige to that impossible rust red, and it was around there my mom started to really open up.

She’d tell me stories I’d never heard. Stories about trips she took and people she knew before me. I learned so much about my mom during these drives, a reminder that although she’s long been the center of my siblings’ and my universe, she’s got her own galaxy out there that exists in the vast unknown beyond ours.

We made a few more pit stops, pulling off at a red rock viewpoint to snap some pictures and trying to re-route when the GPS sent us on a very unintentional detour of a dubious gated property. We fueled ourselves with trail mix and caffeine until we finally reached our bucket list destination: the Grand Canyon.

There’s no subtlety to how the Grand Canyon hits you emotionally. You walk up to a railing and look down where the ground should be, but it’s not there. Just echo-y depths as far as the eye can see. Your brain refuses the scale of it for a second, the enormity almost incomprehensible.

I’d expected to feel small. Everybody tells you you’ll feel that. What I actually felt, though, standing next to my mother on the South Rim, was fast. Too fast.

The Colorado River has been cutting that canyon for something like six million years. The dark rock at the very bottom is closing in on two billion years old. It’s literally happening the whole time you’re looking at it; the canyon is being made right now, actively, at a rate so slow it’s functionally invisible. A hair’s width a year… maybe a bit less. You could stand at that railing your entire life and watch nothing happen. And the juxtaposition of that and seeing my mom looking down at it unmoored me.

She is being carved too. So am I. But, for us, it’s happening at a speed you can see.

Mostly, we haven’t been paying attention to it. When you’re around people regularly, you don’t notice them aging. You might be able to tell in a photograph, or the stiffness in their walk as the years pass. But there, standing with her in front of the perplexing agelessness of nature, it struck me that time is a thief.

The canyon has millions of years and it’s ticking them away one millimeter at a time. I had four days with my mom to squeeze in as much as possible before real life resumed and started chipping away at the years we have left with each other.

The rest of the trip was, in turns, extraordinary and comically ordinary. We almost picked up a stray dog at a Burger King in the middle of nowhere. We huffed and puffed up flights of stairs to walk across a precariously high bridge overlooking the Hoover Dam. We made it to Lake Mead, read plaques about its history, and took the same photos everyone takes. We were treated to one of the best dinners of our lives at Piero’s in Las Vegas.

Back home, we said our goodbyes… but I haven’t stopped thinking about our trip ever since.

The canyon will still be there in 10 years. It will likely look exactly the same, because a decade is nothing to it. My mom will not be exactly the same in 10 years, though, and neither will I. And the number of four-day windows we have left where we’re both healthy enough and free enough and awake enough to sit in a rental car for 12 hours is a finite number. It’s probably even smaller than I think it is.

I’m done “saving” our vacations for “someday.” I will no longer wait for the trip to be a special occasion. I know it won’t always be an epic adventure like a hosted road trip to the Grand Canyon. Smaller, cheaper, closer, it doesn’t matter. We’re just going. If I learned one thing from our journey to the Grand Canyon, it’s that the destination was never the point; the time was.

So call your mom. Better yet, put her in the passenger seat and hit the road.