Monday, July 1, 2013

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Saying goodbye is so hard for me.  I hate it.  Then again, in a technology driven world such as ours, the world just seems to be getting smaller and I feel like I will be linked to everyone somehow for the rest of our lives.  So that's my justification for avoiding goodbye's in general. I've convinced myself that there is no need for goodbye because we will surely meet again.

Last October I went to Vietnam, alone, leaving my husband and kids behind.  And now I am 11 days away from leaving for Vietnam again.  I have written a book/journal chronicling the last year of my life.  I doubt I will ever publish it but this is the excerpt from my book about my "good-bye" before I caught my flight to Vietnam...

"I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning to catch my 6:40 a.m. flight. I promised my daughter I would wake her to say goodbye, and, so I did as I promised. I look at her curly locks all tied up in a scrunchy so as not to suffocate her in the night. She has the most unusually naturally curly hair that grows about as quickly as grass during a drought. I think she’s only had about a half-dozen haircuts in her whole life, but when that mane is wet and all flattened out, it reaches past the middle of her back. It’s the source of many morning arguments, that hair of hers.

She cocoons herself in her bed sheet 365 days a year, regardless of the temperature. She’s generally a warm person, so it’s not unusual for her to be sweating in her cocoon and her little loose neck hairs to be curled up even tighter than usual. But, this morning, when I lean down to hug her good-bye, she’s not sweating—she’s warm like fresh-baked bread. She appears to be expecting me because she un-cocoons her arms before I get low enough to hug her. She likely heard me blow-drying my hair.

“Mommy’s leaving now,” I whisper, resting my cheek on her head.

“Love you, mommy,” she squeaks out in her sleep, while reaching up to hug me.

“I’ll see you in 16 days. I love you so much, curly.” I have aptly nicknamed her “curly,” and I am the only one who calls her that. Only when I’m angry or when she is not listening to me, do I call her by her real name, Freddie.

I turn off all the lights and sneak downstairs. We live in a four-bedroom house where two of the bedrooms are upstairs, and the other two are on the main floor. The two “big kids” have their rooms upstairs, while the master bedroom and baby’s room are on the main floor.

In our bedroom, I feel up the blankets in the dark until I reach my husband’s shoulder. I trace my hand over his cheek and hold him by his head to tilt him back so that I can find his lips. I give him a kiss.

“Have a great time,” he says, still asleep.

“Thank you so much,” I say, because, after all, he has supported this opportunity for me for personal and professional growth, somewhat to my surprise, since I told him about it three months ago. And, without his encouragement, I may very well have backed out of it.

“I love you,” I say and sneak out into the hallway. I rarely tell my husband I love him, because I feel I should only say it when I really feel it, and, right now, at this very moment, I really feel it.

I pause at my son’s door. I don’t dare kiss him for fear of waking him, so I peak in his room at his tiny curled up form on his “big boy” twin-sized bed and draw in one last deep breath of that smell that is so uniquely his. No other room in the house smells like his, and, over the past two years, I’ve probably spent more time in his room than any other room in the house. I spent countless hours breastfeeding him in the brown rocking chair in the corner … the same rocking chair my mother rocked my brother to sleep in 30 years ago. I spent the first year of my son’s life sleeping on his bedroom floor. First, so that I could always hear him breathing to be reassured that he was still alive; and second, so that our nightly feeding sessions would cause as little disturbance as possible to the rest of the sleeping family.

The smell of my son is a mix of fresh, new diaper scent, olive-oil bath wash, clean laundry and new baby smell. It’s heavenly. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gone a day without planting a kiss on his head and taking in a big whiff of his smell. I love it. It’s actually very calming to me. If I stand at his door any longer I will be brought to tears, so I gently close it, put on my Nikes and head out to the airport.

As I drive to the airport, I am a fury of mixed emotions. I feel so free and liberated that I have the ability to fly halfway around the world, by myself. Free to do pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want. But, I also know that when my son wakes up, he will call out for mommy, and mommy won’t be there, and, unfortunately, at 2 years and 1 month old, there is no real way to explain that to him."
 
This time will be a little different.  Kids are older, I've done it once before, our family dynamic has changed, and I know from experience, that everything will be great - for them, and for me.  Vietnam, here I come!!!
 

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