Mondays are for dreaming: Flying fearlessly

When you travel a lot with kids, and especially when you write about it, it is always family airline travel that elicits the greatest wonder and concern from parents who are less experienced. It’s true that flying with kids can be challenging, for all of the reasons that flying has become challenging generally – security hassles, small seats, unexpected cancellations, overcrowded flights, crabby fellow passengers. All of this is amped up when you’re responsible not only for yourself but for a companion who cannot be reasoned with and who might choose to spend the entire flight screaming.

But I’ve found that the excitement of air travel makes it in some ways easier than long car trips especially now that my kids are a little older. Most kids don’t cry the entire time, and even if they do, it’s a few hours of your life and then you move on. Unless the flight is turbulent, they can get up and walk around and use the bathroom. And even if modern-day air travel is famously devoid of glamour for adults, children (at least my children) don’t know from fancy and are just happy that they can watch a movie inches from their face.

For me the difficulty of flying lies not with my children but squarely with myself. I’ve written before that every time I get on an airplane I go through the stages of grief without truly reaching acceptance. This has been true for me since the very first time I set foot on a plane when I was nine and has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. My fear is completely irrational, a beast I can tame but not overcome. It has nothing to do with fact or intellect – I know that flying is safer than driving to the airport. It’s not caused by worries about terrorism or the uncertain world we live in. It is not helped by prayer, alcohol, music, trashy magazines, or deep breathing. I just seem to have some kind of native hatred for the sensation of being so far up in the sky. And don’t even get me started about how I feel on bumpy flights.

Now I’m nothing if not stubborn and I have simply refused to let what I know is unreasoned emotion prevent me from traveling. Flying is the most expeditious way to get to many of the places I love, and so I fly. And it’s very important to me that Tommy and Teddy not pick up this burdensome phobia, so I do everything in my power to hide how I’m feeling. Having Matt there helps, since he loves to fly and is genuinely enthusiastic and unafraid. But he’s not always with me and in those instances I do think I’ve given some Oscar-worthy performances. That Tommy is almost eight and doesn’t know how I feel about flying is something of a personal triumph.

So as I prepare this week to fly from coast to coast with both my children (and no husband – we’re meeting him in Los Angeles) I’m dreaming of absorbing some of their excitement and wonder as we take off. I’d love to feel not terror but joy as we soar into that blue sky. I’d like to feel happy that someone is going to bring me a soda and some pretzels. It doesn’t seem like much to ask.

I hope your Monday dreams are less anxiety-ridden than mine! Please feel free to share a link to your own inspiration below, making sure you link directly to your post, not your site’s homepage and that you link back to this post. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.

Airplane photo courtesy of FS2004 via Flickr.