I Was Told It Would Get Easier(8)

Generally, she’s been a lot spacier lately. I’m not going to drop the M word, but in Health we learned it gives you brain fog to go with your dry vagina and night sweats. I’ll be brutal; they didn’t really sell it, though it was still better than that childbirth video. It’s amazing there’s anything left of your vagina to dry out.

My phone pinged and I told Mom the Lyft guy was waiting. She snapped at me to stall the driver, no pressure, that’s fine. Then when she finally dragged her butt outside, she sarcastically reminded me to hug Anna as if I’d forgotten. Which I had, not the point. Anna is awesome; she takes care of me and leaves me alone, which is the very definition of good parenting, in my opinion. She doesn’t expect all that much from me, unlike my mother. I’m doing my best here, but for Mom that’s never going to be enough.

The Lyft driver was on top of his game. No four-star ratings to lower his average, no sir. He had water bottles. He had hand sanitizer. He had cool jazz playing, and the car smelled of coconut and mango. A mini-vacation on the way to vacation.

I asked my mom if we were sitting together on the plane, but she didn’t know. I’m not scared of flying, but I don’t love it, and Mom said the flight was over five hours long and longer on the way back. Kill me now.

I love my mom, don’t misunderstand me, she’s just a bit up in my beak. She thinks about me too much, it’s creepy. My friends think she’s cool, but that’s because she’s not going to remind them to clean their room or ask about their homework. She waits till they’re gone and then leans in my doorway, like she’s, you know, dropping by, and asks forty thousand questions. If she cares so much about my homework, she should do it herself.





JESSICA


“Mom?”

I smiled at Emily. “Yes?”

“Are we sitting together on the plane?”

“Actually, no. I have to fix it at the airport.” When I’d checked us in the night before, I’d seen the mistake but hadn’t been able to fix it online. Emily shook her head.

“It’s fine.” She paused. “We don’t have to, I just wondered.” In her lap her hands made a half gesture that disowned interest in the outcome.

“Okay,” I said, letting it go, which is my latest parenting strategy. Apparently, I have a tendency to overanalyze everything and then dare to ask follow-up questions, and she gets pissy and I get pissy and we’re off. We’re only ever three sentences away from a fight.

My sister, Lizzy, had gently pointed out this habit, and after wasting forty minutes defending myself, I accepted that anxiety about Emily was making me treat her like an unfriendly witness. But not on this trip, baby. On this trip I was going to take some sage advice and talk to my daughter as if she were a visiting cousin from another state.

“How long is the flight?” asked Emily.

“Around five hours, give or take.”

“That’s nuts, it’s quicker than driving to San Francisco.”

I bit down on the explanation of time as a relationship between speed and distance. This was something else Lizzy told me not to do.

“You’re mom-splaining,” she’d said carefully. “It makes Emily feel like a child and she doesn’t want to feel that way. It’s better intentioned than mansplaining, but equally as irritating.” Lizzy is a completely disorganized part-time teacher and mom of three whose husband is barely contributing enough money as an actor to keep them in ramen noodles, and who is inexplicably happier than I am. Her kids are all at Peak Kid age, so she doesn’t know about teenagers yet.

So I said nothing. Both then, to Lizzy, and now, to Emily.





EMILY


In eighth grade I did a project on Los Angeles International Airport for Social Studies. I had to read about the history of air travel, traffic patterns, architects; it was like 10 percent of the grade. I was a total suck-up. I worked on that thing for weeks. I made one of those tri-fold boards and a freaking diorama with little bushes my mom found somewhere, and tiny cars and planes. I really got into model making and origami and that kind of thing, and I got an A, not to flex or anything. However, the only fact I remember is that LAX gets over eighty-four million passengers a year, and as we came up on the terminal, it looked like every one of them had decided to travel today. The driver squeaked past two buses and defied the laws of physics to fit into a space much smaller than the car. Five-star review for you, sir.

I followed my mom into the terminal. She knew where she was going, because she always does. She’s very certain, my mom. I snapped a pic of the terminal while we were checking the bags, then captioned it Gateway to hell and posted it. The terminal smelled of coffee and printer ink, like always. I got that feeling I get in airports: DEFCON 3, slightly on edge, ready for delay or confusion. Then I noticed a cute guy walking towards the security line, and I start moving in that direction, one of my rolly wheels clicking loudly. Awkward.





JESSICA


Emily was ahead of me at the scanners, and I watched as she easily removed her shoes, dropped her laptop and phone in one tray and her jacket in another, and turned to go through the metal detectors. This is what air travel is to her; this is what it’s always been.

I remember September 11 clearly; we all do. I’d been filled with joy, walking my dog in Riverside Park and enjoying what was, even for New York in early fall, an exceptionally beautiful morning. I was a young lawyer, working hard but having a lot of fun, and my life rolled ahead of me like the yellow-brick road. Of course, that had been 8:00 a.m., and by 9:15, things would never be the same again, but for Emily, who at that point was an unsuspected and rapidly dividing clump of cells in my body, this level of airport scrutiny and anxiety was normal. If they’d waved her through with a smile and let her run up to the gate, she’d refuse to get on the plane.