...And the least you can do is pay attention. And get in the brace position.
So our 6-hour flight home from a 6-week summer vacation in Boston is delayed one hour (sign #1) and we are warned by the cockpit that we will hit severe turbulence pretty much the entire time (sign #2). No biggie, right? This is par for the course with flying. "We can do this, kids, we can do this," I keep thinking to myself.
Fifteen minutes into our 1-hour tarmac wait, my head starts pounding. Uh-oh, I have no Advil...shit. (sign #3)!
Lift-off brings on the craziest turbulence I've had in a long while. The pilot feels bad so he moves us down to 26K feet instead of usual 35K+ (sign #4). "This makes the plane go slower," he informs us "so our arrival will be delayed even longer. I'm sorry folks, but the turbulence is too strong."
Boy the crap is really piling up, huh... And now I've lost count of how many signs, short of sending smoke signals, life is throwing at me. No worries, it can't get worse (famous last words).
Finally, after a waiting for what seemed like an eternity for things to settle down so we can get some drinks, our beverage service comes and within seconds, Liam dumps his entire ICED drink all over himself. He's in the window seat, Mia is in the middle and I'm seated at the aisle. The problem is she and I have drinks that are threatening to spill too. I beg the girl across the way to hold our drinks while I try to rescue my boy. She grudgingly holds my drinks while nervously eyeing her own bouncing tray.
Like any good mom I have changes of clothes for all of us--except they are in the overhead bin and the plane is ROLLING. My attempts to retrieve them were met with laser-beam-like murderous stares from the crew, and admonishments to "sit down "NOW, ma'am!"
Because I'm under threat of bodily harm from the flight attendants, I am unable to retrieve my carry-on to change him for the next hour or so. Can you hear him screaming for an entire hour how his balls are freezing and how I'm the worst mother for letting him get wet?
Now my headache is a MAJOR one accompanied by nausea. And since we are traveling west with the sun, it's 9pm EST for our Boston-acclimated clocks but it's still bright outside. The kids aren't sleeping as I had hoped but BOY are they cranky. And we haven't even talked about how many times I had already fed, cajoled, and soothed them, not to mention gotten up and down for potty breaks and bent over to retrieve various toys and distractions from their entertainment carry-ons.
This can't get worse, right? Of course it can. After returning to our seats from one long-ass potty break in which Liam had to sit on the loo and poop for 20 minutes, he starts screaming:
"You didn't wipe my butt well, mom!" (of course I had; I travel with Cottonelle wet wipes, dammit!).
"Of course I did sweetheart!"
" Well how come my butt hole hurts?"
I am so fucking mortified I want to hide, muzzle him, and punch someone, all at once.
" Shhh...not so loud honey...please! Baby, please, stop yelling...I don't know why it hurts!"
" It hurts where my poop comes out, something is stabbing me down there! Take a look, take a look!"
My friends, imagine him yelling this, repeatedly, at the top of his lungs with me finally, yes, finally bending over and taking a look just to placate him and shut him up. And when he's not yelling about the skewer stabbing him up his ass, he is informing anyone on the flight who will listen: "Hey...I just farted..." Really?!? Are you kidding me with this??!?
Yikes I have rolling nausea now. I reach for barf bags...none. I am frantically searching around for barf bags. None! What the fuck!! Can I flag the flight attendant in time?!? No, because they are smart people and learned about 3 hours ago to not acknowledge nor make eye contact with the nut jobs in row 13.
I quickly dump out the contents of my make up bag, praying the tiny thing will contain all the crap that's about to projectile out of my mouth. A few harrowing moments later, I realize that perhaps puke is not going to come, after all. And sure enough, I luckily don't need the empty make up bag. Phew. I don't barf b/c I think The Man Upstairs felt bad for me.
I just want to back up a bit and say, through all this, my angel girl Mia is holding up like a champ. She's doing anything she can to keep everyone in her nuclear family from falling apart. And what's this? Liam falls asleep with one hour of flying to go. YAY!
Uh-oh...He wakes as we're descending and he's furious, screaming at me:
"I want to get off this plane, NOW!!!" And...
"Hold my hand!" As well as...
"My ear is killing me!!"
When the plane touches down and rolls to a stop and every asshole on the flight grabs his or her bag and queues up in the aisle, Liam yells in the now much-quieter cabin: "Get these people out of our way!" Fuck me...Fuck me...FUCK ME!
And he keeps his bullshit up until we are off the plane and at baggage claim where I am frantically searching for the one face that will make this long nightmare go away. And there it is. One look at his dad finally and mercifully makes Liam SHUT THE FUCK UP.
(Skip over the part where we still have a 1.5 hour drive from Long Beach to San Diego.)
We all finally crawled into bed at 12:30am PT (remember that's 3:30am according to our body clocks...sigh). And as I drift off my brain makes one final, feeble note that I am on 23.5 hours of no sleep because I had awakened at 5 am the day before to start this God-forsaken journey.
Five hours later, at 5:30am PT I am awake again. Sign # 6453 I am completely nuts.
