I left my 3-year-old at home for a weeklong cruise with my parents. It reminded me I'm still their daughter, too.

The author left her toddler at home to travel with her parents. Courtesy of the author I live in Denmark, while my parents live across the Atlantic in Connecticut. Most of our visits now revolve around my 3-year-old son and their role as grandparents. Traveling without him gave me rare time to simply be my parents' daughter again. At our first dinner on Hurtigruten's MS Trollfjord, my parents and I spent most of the meal imagining what my 3-year-old son would have thought. Aksel would have picked at the bread, asked how many courses of "real food" were left before dessert, and probably driven his Hot Wheels through the butter. Instead, he stayed home in Denmark with my husband while my mom, dad, and I sailed south from Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the High Arctic. Outside, black mountains and sharp cliffs rose from the Arctic waters.