I propped myself up on my elbows, still groggy from my leisurely nap on the beach towel. I was momentarily in a state of confusion. That “where am I” feeling I sometimes get after a mid-day nap was followed by my brain trying to make sense of the last 24 hours. Yes, I was really in Sydney! Sydney, Australia!
I was laying on Manly beach in Sydney Australia. Me, a small town girl from Alabama… laying here napping on a beach a world away. The more amazing part. I was here with a husband who loves me and two happy kids that call me mom.
My son was frantically digging a hole in the wet sand and each handful was being carefully constructed into a tower of some sort. He looked over his shoulder, and started digging and piling faster. It was just a few minutes later and his tower lost an unfair battle to the wave that came crashing down on top of it. He laughed hysterically.
I love his laugh. When he was a baby and would laugh I could do nothing for my attempts to get that same deep-gutted laugh to come again. He has a fake laugh, a “I have just done something not so nice to my sister” laugh, a “Im being tickled by my dad” laugh, and his uninhibited drowning in happiness laugh.
My daughter is still in the age of bliss. You know the age of nothing to worry about except why mom won’t let me have another piece of candy when dinner is still an ENTIRE 30 minutes away. She is living it up running from the incoming waves. My children were on board with the idea of going to Sydney when we showed them just how close it was to the ocean. They aren’t the kids who appreciate a good mountain view, but are the kids that will run to the beach like their very breath depends upon touching every single grain of sand in sight.
My husband is smiling. I think he is riding the same high that I am. That “did we really just get on a plane and fly to Sydney” high. That feeling that we are in some parallel universe where we are actually doing the things that 20 year old us only dreamed of. The excitement of being is here is the only thing keeping us functioning through the grog of jet lag. Jet lag, that itself was something I had only dreamed of. My husband experienced it for the first time courtesy of the Army shuttling him off to war at the ripe old age of 20. (Turning 21 in Afghanistan)
Flying to Sydney, Australia was something I thought only happened to the rich and famous. Something that required a winning lotto ticket or having your name on a trust fund. But thats not the case. I guess thats why it felt so unreal to me. So out of reach.
When we were coming in to land in Sydney I was torn with the wish that I could have gotten one more nap, (because a 16 hour flight is just not enough) and excitement that we were FINALLY there!
As we descended into Sydney the four of us were staring out the window like we had to take in every single glimpse of the water, the cliffs and finally the beautiful runway that would bring us to our destination. I was probably the most childlike of us all when I saw horses out in the water. It was like something out of a movie. And one point I had to remind myself to breathe, so I sat back in my seat and was shocked that people were sleeping or looking down at a book or catching the last few minutes of their in-flight movie! Does anyone else want to look around at people that do this on a plane and ask them what their life is like if they don’t even want to stare out the window of a plane when they land!?!? I was a flight attendant for more than 6 years and I still get giddy at the idea of flying. I still feel a wild sense of pride when we are on the runway in the take off roll and the plane is speeding down the runway about to take off. I can’t believe my husband gets to fly these big giant jet planes!
In my best estimate when I was a flight attendant I flew around 18-20 flights a week. (Usually I flew 6 flights on day one and 6 more on day 4 with a few mixed in and I had to commute to work and again back home adding 2 more flights to my week.) I usually worked a 4 day trip, and on a typical month I had 4 trips. That’s looking at 70 flights a month. Given vacation and time off thats around 800 flights in a year. So over the course of my flight attendant career I flew dangerously close to 5000 flights. 5000 flights and I still want a window seat so I can watch the ground get farther away on take off. So I can look out the window during flight and try and guess what city we may be flying over. So I can watch out the window in amazement when we are coming in to land.
When I was just a teen I went on my first flight in a Cessna 182. I was hooked. I was in Civil Air Patrol and my first orientation flight had me looking at the world in a different way. The clouds above me didn’t seem to far away anymore. The world felt smaller, but at the same time I realized how huge it is. Some of the more experienced crowd may have looked at that silly girl that talked about the feeling of taking off like it was cute. But call it what you want… a fire was lit inside me that will never be extinguished. Maybe its a small part of the strong bond my husband I have. We fell in love with flying in the Civil Air Patrol, and then we fell in love with each other. Much like any adult would look at 16 year olds and think it will never last they may have thought the same about our passion for flying. But its looking like we find something we like young and latch on to it for a lifetime.
I had seen flight attendants on movies. The Glamorous life they lived. (They never showed the real life of a door that wasn’t sealed letting in deicing fluid all over her head, or her having to clean up puke mid flight, or her having to use tongs to get something out of the toilet, or her having the use tweezers to get a passengers ear bud piece that had come off inside his ear, or her being the only flight attendant on the plane and having to deal with a drunk passenger trying to get his feel of what he thinks is the in-flight entertainment, or the time she was scared that the sweet little old lady in 1A may be having a heart attack.)
It wasn’t until I was 16 that I flew on a commercial flight the first time. Sitting in the airport waiting to board was thrilling. Watching flight attendants walk by with their perfect hair and crisp uniforms and just wondering where they were going. On the flight watching them do their safety demonstration I was even more in awe. I was in a dream land. Dreaming of being one of them. Of wearing that uniform, being able to walk in those heels, even passing out peanuts and those cute little cocktail napkins with Continental’s logo on it. But sadly none of these ladies were small-town girls from Fruithurst. Me? I couldn’t be a flight attendant. I would never be able to walk so well in high heels or walk confidently through the airport with the dignity and grace they had. I would have to choose another dream. This one was not attainable.
When I was 18 the man I fell in love with at CAP and I married and we moved away to the beautiful Army town of Fayetteville NC. Life was good. He started taking flight lessons on the weekends because his dream to be a pilot was burning inside him just as brightly as mine to become a flight attendant. With neither of us talking the other out of these wild outlandish dreams it was only a matter of time that we would both be living our dream. After he served a couple of tours in the Army fighting bad guys it was time for us to see what we were made of.
We packed up the U-Haul truck, sold our house, and changed our address to Florida. My husband started flight school and I got a job at a bank. It was a good job, but it wasn’t my dream. Working near an airport we had a few flight attendants come in to do their banking. I was no less impressed with them here in my bank than I was being in their airport.
One day I was chatting with a friend that worked in the office at our apartment complex. She had a new photo of her husband on her desk. He had gone to the same flight school my husband was currently attending and now had a job at an airline. I wanted to do back flips for her. Watching someone else work the path to their dream and knowing what it had taken for them to get there just made it that much more real. I confided in her my dream. “My husband’s company is hiring flight attendants”. She had to write down the spelling for me because it was one I had never heard of. I went to their website and the anxious feeling in my stomach made me nervous to even put my name in. (Years later I got to work a flight with my friend’s husband.)
I did it. I applied. And I waited to get a “no” letter. Instead I got a phone call. I was sitting in my apartment about to leave for work when the HR lady on the other end of the phone asked me to fly to Indianapolis the next week for a job interview.
I guess it’s a given that I got the job. I couldn’t believe it. Most days when I worked I still couldn’t believe it. I had passengers that commented on the fact that I clearly loved my job, and I would whisper “don’t tell my boss, but I would do this even if they weren’t paying me”.
I didn’t love it everyday, but I laughed at the idea of getting a “real job”. I had worked there and had enough seniority that I could pick what days I worked. (16 days a month, MAX) I could almost pick where I went. It was years before I even met my supervisor and that time it was just luck… working there you just didn’t encounter supervisors unless you needed them OR you did something wrong.
I often get asked by people who knew my old exciting life if I miss it. And depending on the day I will have different answers. The full truth… I miss it every day. But that chapter in my life has closed. Much like my son creating a beautiful sand castle on the beach that he enjoyed building I had a wonderful career as a flight attendant, and like the wave that came and washed it all clean; motherhood has washed over me, and I will never be a flight attendant again. I keep my uniforms, I still have my bag with my manuals inside. I still have pictures kids drew for me on the back of cocktail napkins. I still have the slips of paper with flight numbers on it. I Marie Kondoed my closet not long ago. I let go of things that no longer spark joy, but the momentos from my flying days… Marie Kondo, herself couldn’t come and take those from me.
Some days we may be in the glory of our glamorous career, some days we may be on a beach on a dream vacation… and some days we are sitting in the closet laughing at an old box of memories and tossing out the old high heels (that spark pain in your feet and not one single sliver of joy.) Which makes me wonder… what memories am I making today that will bring a laugh 10 years from now! Which days am a currently living that will leave 40 year old me wishing I could go back and do again?
“Sometimes you will not know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr Suess
