Fear of Flying with Children

The flight attendant with “Becky” embroidered on her black apron leans down to the mild-mannered twelve year old in the row behind us and asks sweetly, “what book of the Bible are you reading, honey?”

“Revelation,” the girl replies.

“That’s deep reading,” Becky says.

I understand why the girl didn’t want to sit in a row full of strangers. She’s traveling with her mom, dad, younger sister, brother, and the babies of the family, three-year-old twin girls. Before take off she found herself the odd one out. Through clenched teeth she told her mother, “I don’t want to sit alone.” Mom initiated a series of whispered negotiations and took the lonely row herself.

I wish I could take the lonely row. I’m in the middle seat between Cedar, my two-and-a-half year old and her eight-month-old sister, Coral. We’re on our return trip. It’s been a long week.

In front of me is a Zip Loc bag full of ice and two leaking bottles of amoxicillin for three little infected ears. Cedar’s souvenirs of roughhousing with her older cousins are two horribly scraped knees and a shiner she refers to as her “black guy.” Coral spent four days of her week meeting the cousins with a 102-degree fever. She cut her thumb sticking it down the shower drain while I soaped her sister. Chewing on her thumb with her two razor sharp bottom teeth, she’s reopened the wound and her jammies are now streaked with blood.

I try to take the lead from the Bible girl’s calm mother, comfy across the aisle with her novel and no kids. If a mother of five can fly, I can. I take deep breaths, but this flight is a challenge. I’ve only just learned how to use the bathroom when I’m alone with them let alone lug the whole operation onto a plane.

I don’t fly well myself. Every flight my mind turns cinematic. I feel like I’m living the opening scene of a plane crash thriller. Off hand comments drip with eerie significance. The couple in front of me just finished a detailed discussion of the flight’s altitude, the turns we’ll make, and the thunderstorms the pilot said we’d be skirting. The mention of Revelation concerns me. I decide if the plane crashes, I’ll sing calmly to the girls. In my final moments, the halo of “Good Mother” will descend and we’ll Kum Ba Yah our way into the next life.

***

The six-hour flight out of Anchorage had a glorious beginning. I handled the first crisis so well it felt like heaven opened and the angels swooped down and ran their elegant fingers over Cedar and Coral’s eyelids, whisking them to sleep. They gave me a massage and pedicure, handed me an eye pillow, and an Ambien, and kissed my cheeks. For a little while at least.

Coral’s car seat was buckled down and she stood in it happily shouting, “Ba. Ba. Ba.” Cedar sat quietly in her seat playing with her tray table, pushing it up and down. Only the early boarders were on the plane. I finished tucking our toys and books into the pockets in front of us.

Cedar looked up at me, locked on my eyes, and said, “Mom, I need to potty.” My greatest fear.

I looked up the rows. Regular passengers were beginning to crowd the front of the plane their bags bumping seats. I looked at Coral, bouncing in the car seat. I looked at Cedar, read her eyes. I asked a nearby flight attendant who had overheard the whole thing, “Do we have time.” She said, “Go! Go!” as in “Save yourself, my ankle is broken and the killer’s coming.”

I scooped up Coral, took Cedar’s arm and ran toward the back of the plane. I improvised. The sink, immaculate and dry from recent cleaning, was the perfect baby seat. I plunked Coral in it and kept one hand up to keep her from falling. With the other hand I hoisted Cedar onto the potty and I crouched balancing on the balls of my feet until she was done. The flight attendant, peeking in the open door, said, “I never thought of the sink that way before.”

Buffeted by incoming passengers, we struggled back to our seats. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me,” I said concussing both girls on seatbacks as I staggered down the aisle against the flow.

Back in row 19, I managed to nurse Coral to sleep, transfer her to the car seat and buckle her in without waking her up before we even taxied. She slept through take off. Four minutes into the flight Cedar asked for her pink blanket and said, “I want my bedtime story.” I pulled out her book and began to read. She fell asleep ten minutes later.

I sat between my sleeping children and thought what all parents think when they look down at the angelic faces of their sleeping children, “This is what makes it all worthwhile.” The intercom chirped, “We’ll be coming though the cabin with our digiplayers. Ten movies for ten dollars.” Shocked by my luck, I pulled out my wallet. It felt like traveling alone, just with tiny, breathing, girl-shaped suitcases. I considered ordering a gin and tonic.

Hubris. We don’t have a TV at home and, even though I sneak DVDs on the computer after bedtime, I don’t let the girls watch shows. Snug in my headphones and hypocrisy, I indulged. Cedar woke up three hours before the flight was over. Groggy, she blinked and seeing the tiny TV on my tray sat straight up. “I want to watch, Mom,” she said.

I thought of the sleep-deprived tantrum that might be brewing. My anti-TV zealotry melted as I clicked though the kid’s shows. At that moment, I would have plugged her into SpongeBob. She tried the headphones, handed them back to me and said, “They’re too big”. For the next three hours, we dug through the busy bag, and ate snacks, and talked, and read, and tried to use our “indoor voices” because everyone else on the plane was asleep. Except Coral, who woke up every forty-five minutes to scream, nurse, and fall back asleep.

I regretted not ordering that gin and tonic.

***

As we sit on the runway in Chicago, delayed by the threat of thunderstorms, Coral screams. I wonder how she’s affecting the Bible girl’s reading. Is there anything about screaming babies in Revelation? Is there anything about being twelfth in line for take off? Coral won’t sit in her seat, she won’t nurse, and she won’t eat Cheerios. She struggles beet red in my lap.

Cedar wants me to read to her. In the second I take to tell her I can’t because her sister is freaking out, Coral notices I am not paying complete attention to her and ups her volume. I take solace in the fact that all of us wearing seatbelts. No one can turn around to make eye contact with me, that awful woman with the screaming baby. Perhaps people will assume it’s someone else’s kid.

I wonder if Coral knows something I don’t. Perhaps she’s having some pre-language psychic flash and she knows the plane is going down, but because she’s an infant no one will listen. It’s Look Whose Talking meets Lost.

I remind myself that many women are in labor for longer than we will be in transit.

***

I want to kiss the Alaskan ground when we get off the plane at 1:30 a.m., but I’m too burdened with the car seat, backpack, snack bag, blankets, boppy pillow, Coral and Cedar.

As I hobble down the jetway, a mother with four children passes me. She’s tired too, but manages to ask me, “Do you need any help?”

“No. Thanks,” I stutter, astounded at her confidence. I imagine she thinks of me as a bumbling moron—a mom who can’t even handle two. “Did you see that haggard woman with only two, and two years apart at that. Piece of cake,” she might say to her oldest, who was about six. “Yes, mama,” the girl would reply, “Even I could have kept those kids quiet.”

I see the mom of four at the baggage claim. Her whole family is waiting, brothers, sisters, mother, aunts. They’re holding big signs and smiling. They pick up her kids and swing them all around. Holding the baby, the grandmother cries.

Wish me luck. I entered this in the Write-Away Contest . If you have a post about travel, visit scribbit, a great Alaskan blogger, before May 15 and enter the contest.