The drive over the hill to the airport in our compact little Prius with the kids’ bickering voices both too close (and ergo too loud) but also not quite close enough. I am acutely aware that the mere inches that separate us now shall soon be more. Jason is trying to have a discussion with me about refinancing and money and budgets and I am discreetly tuning him out to avoid the inevitable argument. I am also paying enough attention to distract myself from the anxiety of leaving the kids behind. It will not even be three full days. Not quite 58 hrs, actually. I don’t know why I struggle with this so. Considering the fact that I spent most of my waking hours internally wishing I could just GET AWAY for a few days… it seems practically blasphemous for me to sit here and have to work so hard to squelch my fears. Fear of what? Accusations of abandonment? Clearly, the kids are not going to be so traumatized by my 58 hrs away that they will harbor deep resentment towards me the rest of their lives… Fear that I am perhaps a very selfish mother for putting my own needs ahead of my children’s? In all fairness, that’s not really accurate. After all, their immediate needs are certainly all being attended to in my absence and they are being well cared for by their father. What then? What troubles me so?
Based on the recurring theme of all my persistent nightmares over the past week, I understand my fear is that something terrible, horrible, unfathomable is going to happen to them while I am so very far away. And that I, due to my physical geographical distance, will find myself unable to be the attentive, loving mother they will so desperately need during a time of unspeakable tragedy. That I will, in essence, utterly and completely fail them in my role as mother. That I will not BE THERE when I am needed most in that critical moment when a child wants only his/her mother and NO ONE ELSE…Instead, I will be a full day’s travel away. And that I, besides dealing with the emotional upheaval of having some tragedy befall my child, will additionally have to deal with the lifelong guilt of having “not been there.”
Granted, the logical, practical and reasonable side of my brain knows that the odds of something terrible happening while I am gone for 58 hrs are slim to none. But does that soften for one single moment the fear that grips my heart as I write this waiting for my second flight, traveling yet further away from my beloved offspring? Nope. Because my heart, my achy breaky heart, is working overtime to squash any of the intelligent messages my brain is trying to get through to me. What we have here, folks, is a failure to communicate.
After a delay in the flight I finally board my second plane, this time to my final destination. The plane is disconcertingly small. Why is it that the smaller the plane the greater my anxiety in boarding it? After all, one would reason, a heavier plane would fall out of the sky much faster than a lighter one. And seeing as the miracle of flight is still beyond my comprehension (how many thousands of pounds are suspended in air!? HOW is this possible?), I should surely feel more comfortable in a smaller, lighter mode of air transportation no? Alas, no. Small planes make me nervous.
The anxiety of my last nightmare now takes over me. In the last one it was I who had the tragedy. It was my plane that went crashing into the ground, creating in that inferno two motherless children. Goodness gracious, what is wrong with me? I am not normally THAT anxious of a person. Sure, I’ve been called a worry wart ever since becoming a mother but my true nature is that of a daredevil, a thrill seeker, an adventurer! I love flying! I used to jump out of planes for crying out loud! What is up with me?
I pull out my book (The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar) which I started on my first flight today and am already halfway through. It is helping me escape the guilt-inducing internal chatter that is noisily pelting away at me like hail on a tin roof. I can lose myself in my book and instead wrap myself in the anxiety of another mother! Brilliant.
But it works, the flight is soon over. As we begin our descent I can hear a little baby start to cry as I feel my own ears painfully adjusting to the change in altitude. I hold my nose and pop my ears to great relief. The poor baby has no such option. She begins to scream, a very wretched cry that pierces right through me. I start to squirm in my seat. I never used to notice a baby’s cry before becoming a mother myself, at least not in a way that affected me any more than: “how annoying.” But I am acutely aware of these cries and I can feel my pulse race and my heart start pounding. It is physically painful to hear this poor baby’s distraught cries. It is becoming excruciating and all I want to do is take away the baby’s pain. I wish I could relieve this poor little creature of her suffering. But the wails just become more and more hysterical. I look around and discover a sea of blank faces. No one seems remotely disturbed by the cries any more than just a mild annoyance for the disruption in silence that was previously there. I, however, am now beyond fidgety and can sense little beads of sweat forming on my brow. I look at the older woman next to me, just returning from a visit with her daughter and grandchildren and she seems to not even notice that there IS a baby crying. Am I completely loony that I am the only one (besides, perhaps, the baby’s own mother!) to be so distraught over these painful cries? It is in this moment that I realize just how much becoming a mother has changed me. I have written in my journal at length about this metamorphosis, especially after the birth of my first child. I have watched the transformation with equal parts awe and sadness. Goodbye old me! Hello new me! Never quite sure whether to mourn the death of the hardened and fearlessly reckless woman I used to be or celebrate the much softer, more nurturing, more compassionate new me. I seem to be perpetually confused over that one.
We land just before what I am sure would have been a full blown panic attack given a few more minutes and the baby finally settles down. I head out and absent mindedly retrieve my rental car, distracted by my strong reaction to what was, essentially, just someone else’s baby crying.
I get on the road for the hour long drive to my hotel. It is now late, nearly 9:30 pm and I am tired. It’s been a long day. I spend the first 30 mn of the drive processing, analyzing, pondering. I wonder why I have such a hard time being away from my kids. I certainly fail to cherish and appreciate every single moment when I am with them and god knows I have, quite frequently, secretly wished Calgon would take me away. So, why the heartache? Why can’t I enjoy this time away? Why the massive guilt? They are surely doing just fine. I am not THAT important that they can’t go a few days without me…. I acknowledge to myself that the hardest thing to adjust to after becoming a mother was the loss of my FREEDOM. My freedom to come and go as I please, sleep whenever and for however long I wanted to, pee alone, eat with two hands and without getting up a hundred times…and most of all, TRAVEL. Oh how I miss kid free traveling. My pre-kid years were spent with a great deal of international travel and I look back so fondly on that time. The excitement of new things, new foods, new languages, new people…. Ah, pure happiness. And here I am doing a very small jaunt away and not appreciating it one bit. Being consumed by stress, guilt and anxiety. How’s that for freedom?
Shackled, not by my children, but by my own misguided feelings and emotions. Silly me. I turn on the radio and eventually find the one station in all of Louisiana that is not playing country music. I turn it up, louder than it would normally be with the kids in the car. I noticed that, even though I am going 70mph, truckers in big rigs are flying by me. I see the speed limit here is much higher than in Cali. Well, I used to love to drive fast. In fact, I used to be a little speed demon before my children’s precious little bodies were in my car. I speed up to what seems to be the average speed, about 85mph and feel a tinge of familiarity. Ah, yes, this is nice. I sing along to the radio, loudly, knowing my children are NOT here to complain about it. So there. I start to feel my soaked wings start to dry. The storm has passed and the heavy downpour of guilt has stopped. I can now fly down this road. Un-encumbered. Free at last.
