Do We HAVE to Choose the Long Plane Trips?

If there is anything we should have learned in our lives, it should be not to take long plane trips with our boys. It’s always terrible. I don’t know that traveling for 20 hours with small children would ever be good for anyone, but for us it always seems to be a special sort of ugly.

Like this last time when Eliot puked six times before we had even reached Chicago (our first of two layovers, our second of four airports). Or like when the airline lost our bags, the bags with all our warm clothes in them. (I say, ‘all’, but because we have lived in warm islands for six years now, what I really I mean is that we brought all the warm clothes we own, and all of that equaled about two outfits for each of us.) But two outfits are still far better than no outfits. And landing in Newfoundland, where it was -3 degrees Celsius and 100 km north winds without *any* warm clothes to change into is a rough situation.

And then, the night we finally arrived at the house, all of us exhausted people fell gratefully into beds, and an hour after we fell asleep I woke to the sound of Lincoln puking in the hallway right outside our room. And then the next day Joe got sick.

And then the second night the boys both woke up at midnight (well, ok, Eliot never went to sleep) and bounced on beds, giggling and laughing about the snow outside until 3 am. And when we tried the trick of splitting up the boys, one for each of us, and we had tried sitting with them, lying down with them, leaving them alone, letting them play, insisting that they don’t play, and every single one of those had failed and we had used all our patience and then some, and the kitchen oven clock read 3:19am and we had slept two of the last thirty-six hours, we both found each other in the kitchen getting some water.

And Joe, angry and exhausted, said, “I don’t care WHAT we do next but we are NOT traveling. We are NOT switching time zones.” And I said nothing, because of all the things that had been said in the last three days, that one sounded the most right, it sounded like the truest and wisest thing that anyone had ever said.

But the truth is, we’ve said that before. We say that every time. It’s SO hard every time, and in the dark of night, in the times when there is nothing left, no rest, no understanding, no gentleness, it is easy to make our decisions for our future life.

But we know we don’t mean it. And usually the next day we are exclaiming over new things to see and new places to visit, and saying, “It’ll be hard, but it’ll be fine.” Because it always is, after a few days, after a few good night’s sleep, after a few new things we’ve never seen before.

Maybe there’s a lesson here, about not making future declarations when you’re in your darkest night. Maybe it’s important to remember that we make declarations in the night all the time. (I do it about once a week when I decide I’m going to start running.)

So maybe the declarations come in the night, but the choices we really want to make come in the morning. Maybe the lesson is that we wake up in the morning and the sun lights up our rooms and our lives, and it reminds us of everything else, not just the hard, dark nights. So we make the calculation again, the never ending math of life: does the good of what I’m doing now outweigh the bad? In the light of day we are able to add in the things we gain from the choices that we make, like the excitement of wearing winter boots for the very first time. Or I remember what I gain from NOT running, i.e., more time to be comfortable and less time running.

That’s simplistic, isn’t it? It is, and I don’t mean to be dismissive. It isn’t always that simple. Sometimes we do things because other people make choices for us, sometimes our health limits us, sometimes we have done everything we can think of to make a change and there just is no change to be made.

But for most of us, in the end, we choose what is the most important to us, no matter what we declare or promise or insist upon in the nights.

And for us, the dark nights fade, and the horror of washing puke covered clothes in airport bathrooms fades (barely), and the long nights turn into gloriously long naps where the house is quiet for hours.

And we choose, again and again, the look of wonder on Lincoln’s face as he’s seeing his first snow, the excited exclamations at the airplanes, and the learning things that we would have never thought to learn otherwise. The newness of getting spoken to in French, the first time we hold Canadian currency in our hands, and the brand new sight of fir forests bowing under the weight of snow.

 

When the sunshine hits our faces and the dark corners flee away, we remember. Those are the things we want.

(That, and not running. I don’t ever want to run, no matter what my nighttime self thinks.)