There is peace of mind and then there is a piece of your mind. The moment you become a parent you start giving out lots of the second in an effort to get a small chunk of the first. Here is a hint to all the youngsters out there who might be reading this: The thing not to tell your Mom in the only phone call you make to her as you backpack through Eastern Europe with your buddies is that the hostel you just stayed at did not provide towels so the best way to dry off after a shower was to run naked through the hallways. The only thing this will ensure is that your mother will stay awake so long she will need an Ambien enema to get any rest. Send a postcard instead.
If you are a male child older than voting age and you have just returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic with a posse of friends and your Mom asks if you met anyone special, think twice about telling her that all the young women you were introduced to had the same name: “Hi, I’m A Hundred Dollars.” Even if you assure her you stuck to your tight budget she will only smile at you lovingly and wait for you to leave the room so she can go on Web M.D. to research social diseases and open up that special occasion Pinot-Grigio-in-a-Drum.
All my life I thought nothing of hopping on planes headed for distant lands just as my children do now. But certain current events coincided with my entrance to parenthood. As soon as my kids were born planes either started dropping out of the sky or I started noticing and all of a sudden there was no trip worth taking that might leave my children motherless. There was an episode of Mad About You with this theme. Paul and Jamie had just become parents and in their patented urban neurotic way they decided to fly in separate planes to a family wedding so their baby would at least have one parent left if there was a disaster. Ultimately they realized that trying to second-guess fate robs you of life.
And ultimately so did I. After twenty years of remaining earthbound I married a man with a passion for travel and a persuasive manner. For our honeymoon we flew to Europe and took a Mediterranean cruise. When Daughter joined her university’s first study abroad program post 9/11 we visited for a week in the small Italian village where she spent a semester. We have flown across the Atlantic a half dozen times and traveled to at least as many states in the U.S. All in the past six years. That’s not to say it’s a stress free experience for me – ever. I’m cranky, I never sleep on board and anything I eat sits in my stomach like a dead possum. Once we’re at our destination and people ask me if I had a good flight I just smile at them and think to myself any time my seat lands with the rest of the plane it’s a good flight.
In my regular weekly meetings with the Wise Man I attempt to unravel the reasons behind my poorly disguised death-march drive for control. When I tell him about the self-imposed air travel moratorium and my struggle to shake it off he asks me, “What do you think this is about?” I tell him, “I don’t like being on a plane someone else is flying.” He gives me his inscrutable half-smile. “No one does,” he says, “but so few of us are pilots.”
And our time is up.