Jen Winsor is the author of Ship Moms. She lives in St. John’s. (Submitted by Jen Winsor)
Jen Winsor of St. John’s has a lot of takeaways from her time working aboard cruise ships.
But none are perhaps as lasting as Gabriel — her eight-year-old son.
Winsor was freshly single in 2015 when she took a contract with a cruise line to manage arts and entertainment offerings on board. She was immediately immersed into the on-board world of hectic schedules and demanding passengers. Part of crew life, she discovered, was hallmarked by hookups, relationships and romance — the almost inevitable byproducts of living cheek and jowl with hundreds of co-workers.
In her previous marriage, Winsor had struggled with infertility. So when, after a one-night stand with a cute Brazilian bartender named Luiz Dutra, she began feeling off and ended up with a positive pregnancy test, she was “scared, confused and terrified,” she told CBC Radio’s Atlantic Voice.
But she also saw the long-desired opportunity to become a mother.
“When I found out for sure, it was kind of immediate. I knew I was going to have the baby,” she said.
Winsor chronicles her journey to motherhood in her new book, Ship Moms. The book intersperses that tale with stories of nine other women, culled from hours of interviews Winsor conducted with women all over the globe.
Her book’s tagline — True Tales of Love and Lust at Sea — gives a reality TV vibe, which Winsor says rings true.
“I do believe that cruise ships are a floating gold mine of drama,” she said.
“I believe that it is the perfect makings of a reality television show that no cruise line would ever really let happen on board.”
Winsor spoke with Atlantic Voice about her new book. You’ll have to listen for the full scoop on Luiz.
Listen to this episode of Atlantic Voice:
Atlantic Voice’Til Gangway Do Us Part?
Working on cruise ships is “a floating gold mine of drama” according to Jen Winsor of St. John’s. And she should know: when she was a crew member, she met a cute Brazilian bartender who changed her life. Her new book is called Ship Moms – and it details women’s stories of on board relationships and the babies that result. (Including hers.)
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What makes cruise ship life — working life — dramatic?
A: Working where you live just makes things much more interesting.
So, crew members will typically do seven-month contracts without a day off, and then they’ll take two months off. So for those seven months, these people are your everything. They’re your coworkers, but they’re also your friends. And when you have a rough time, you know they’ll be there for you like a family.
So it’s a very dramatic, kind of compressed, environment. You know, the same way that if you were in a relationship with a fellow crew member and then that relationship broke up — you can’t escape from that person. You are stuck on that ship together and you will absolutely see them all the time.
It’s just part of it. And you’re around them all the time in pretty close quarters.
Can you tell us about some of these unwritten rules around dating on a cruise ship. In your book, you kind of outline these relationship categories — can you tell us a little bit about those?
On board, obviously a lot of relationships come to be. A lot of the crew are young people who are traveling and making money and a lot of times they’re single. A lot of times they’re not single. People just enjoying being consenting adults and having a great time.
But then there is the people who once they start becoming exclusive we would say “till gangway do us part.” It would be an issue of OK, well, that couple, they’re together and they’re exclusive, but only for this contract. You know once one of them signs off for their next contract or for vacation, it typically would end that relationship.
But then there is the ones that, you know, they’re lifers. They are truly in love. And they essentially would move heaven and earth to be together, and they practically have to be together. A lot of these are obviously like mixed nationality couples that are from very different places.
But, probably the most common [couples are] the ones that are just there for fun, of course.
Why did you end up years later wanting to collect stories of other cruise ship moms and write about them?
When me and Luiz, you know, when he did move to Canada and we were like going to try out this thing, we had a really rough time in the beginning. He was honest about some things, but it was still a rough time. Plus, we were trying to figure out how he was staying in Canada and it was just, you know, it was just drama after drama.
It felt like whenever friends and family were around me, they’d like sit me down with a cup of tea and say, ‘OK, tell me what’s the news?’ And like, you know, I give them the whole spiel.
And so one day I just kind of said, ‘you know, isn’t this crazy? What’s happening?’ And, I just think of all the women that are out there on every cruise ship around the world, who are in this situation like me and dealing with this. And I mean, it was just like this moment of like — ‘oh my goodness.’
Winsor with her partner, Luiz Dutra, and their son, Gabriel. The family lives in St. John’s, after Winsor and Dutra met initially while both working on the same cruise ship. (Submitted by Jen Winsor)
Is this shorthand? Like ‘ship mom’ is what you would call yourself and other women in this situation? Is this a term?
Yeah — you call each other ship moms. At the time I was an administrator on a Facebook group that was called Royal Moms and there were like thousands of women on this Facebook page and they just post, you know, ‘I’m from Italy, and my partner is from Peru, and the baby was conceived in Cuba, but we live in Australia.’ And then, like, a picture of the family.
It was just like so cool to run down through the page and see all these women.
Some of the situations that some of them were in were not the greatest. But they were making it work for their kids.
One thing I’m struck by in these stories you’ve collected, of these ship moms, is that life is tough. Things don’t always work out. These are international relationships that come about under pressure. Sometimes the couples try to work things out, sometimes they don’t at all. But they are stories of curve balls, hey?
Yeah, there is a lot of ups and downs certainly.
I think by putting all the different stories in there, I’m kind of hoping that a lot of different women can see themselves within all the different stories and all the different things that happen to these women. I didn’t want these kind of polished stories, and even in telling my own, which snowballed into revealing a lot more about myself than I’d ever had anticipated.
But I just had this kind of overwhelming feeling of nobody wants to read stories, and a memoir, about a perfect life that’s tied together in a bow and everything’s great and worked out. Because it’s not real. It’s not real life, and I don’t think people would relate to that.
So I just wanted to be as real and open and honest about everything as much as I could. And I’m just so grateful that the women shared their stories with me in a way that I could do that for them as well.
Some of it’s certainly not pretty, but it’s out there. And hopefully people who are reading it will, I guess, understand that’s the reason for the sharing of the stories is, I guess, not about sensationalizing anything. It’s about just sharing stories with women who can understand and relate.
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