I took the red-eye home from Los Angeles last night.
After a week or so of driving cross-country in a tiny 2007 Ford Focus crammed to the roof with teen paraphernalia, a one-way ticket to Detroit seemed like it would be the last rosy leg of a journey which saw my daughter launch her way into adulthood.
I don't know what I was thinking when I cooked up this idea of a road trip from Michigan to California. Perhaps it was the lure of a repeat performance of three years ago, when my son and I made the same trip. He still gives glowing reports about it to this day, even though we endured an entire country's worth of 100+ degree temperatures and his car broke down twice.
What could be more rewarding and special than ten days of mother-daughter bonding?
The "specialness" wore off rather quickly when I realized I was trapped in the car with a woman-child who was depressed over leaving her friends and boyfriend. She slept the first two days, breaking only for food and bathroom use, text messaged non-stop when she was awake, and barely maintained any conversations of more than a couple of sentences.
While not exactly surly, she wasn't great company. By the end of my ten-day journey, I was looking forward to going home and settling into my now empty nest. I had plans for her room. Huge plans. I also wanted to see how my garden was growing and was wondering if my husband had killed my cranky lovebird in my absence. In essence, I was excited to be leaving LA.
Then I got to the airport. I had forgotten how tiring flying could be.
During the initial stages of my transcontinental odyssey, I was largely incommunicado. Part of the reason was that I was driving, and the rest had to do with a lack of internet access, even with a laptop connect card. Because of this, I completely missed the results of this poll which determined that most people would like the younger passengers on their flight segregated by age.
After last night’s flight, you can add my vote.
Before you pick up a virtual tomato to hurl at me, remember that I am a mother and my kids were once young travelers too, and sometimes not among the best behaved. I’m the first to admit that parents do the best they can under stressful situations, and sometimes they just can’t control everything. Once my then three-year-old son once dumped his barbecued rib dinner onto the lap of a seatmate. I guess he didn’t like the look of the guy. Of course, I apologized profusely, but that didn’t alleviate the stickiness felt by my fellow traveler, who spent the remainder of the trip to Denver growling under his breath.
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