Sometimes you don’t want your kids to be anything like you. I usually don’t get airsick, but sometimes, for no discernable reason other than the movement of a plane and my inner ear getting it wrong, my head is tricked into feeling like air flight is a wild, broken-roller-coaster ride.
Whether it happens on a particular flight is somewhat arbitrary, but once the feeling starts, I can’t stop it; the slightest bump or roll is translated as devastating, severe and crooked movement. From that second on, my world spins down to the focused and simply very hard work of just- get-through-this.
I’ve long wondered about my younger son and air flight; he’d gone unaffected for years, but I’d seen worrisome signs.
Once, I picked him up from a park and his lips were the color of thick ice — gray and bloodless. He turned toward me, slowly, as if moving his head might spill it. “I feel weird.” “Were you spinning on anything?” I asked before he groaned and fell deeply asleep, head lolling as I turned corners toward home. But it was this latest plane trip that cinched it for me. Now I know.
We took off from DIA at nightfall, a crispness falling like rain, and then actual rain, wind, clouds spinning in from nowhere, the runway quickly blanketed, bundled in. Storm. By then the whole plane was seated, my two sons on either side of me, my husband across the aisle with a book and a face of relaxed, Zen-like calm.
The lightning started, and then the folksy talk about being in for a bumpy flight. Up, up, up we went. On the window side, my older son leaned forward, watching the twisting and banking like a movie unreeling through his small oval window. “Lightning just hit the wing and we’re sideways, completely” he says. “All the houses are beside us instead of under us.”
“Stop talking,” I say. “Please.”
I open my eyes and look at my younger son. He’s sitting beside me like a skeleton: stiff, bones bent at hard right angles, arms like half-triangles draped over and gripping the armrests, feet flat on the floor, head, neck, jaw, forehead locked in concentration. Eyes shut, mouth broken open, chest falling and rising too fast.
“Darn it,” I think, and the plane bumps like we’ve pulled too far into a garage. I catch my husband’s attention: “You need to take care of him; I can’t.” Already my head is spinning and I ache to close my eyes, become motionless, go anywhere in my head but where I am. “Why?” he asks, holding the place in his book with a finger. “Look at him,” I say.
Minutes later, I crack open one eye. My husband has gone back to his book. I get his attention and give him one of those looks. He defends himself by saying something true. “There’s nothing I can do. He wants me to leave him alone.” He goes back to his book — he’s smarter than me.
Even though I know I can’t, I try to fix it. I do all the things I know won’t work. I talk to him: He wants me to be quiet — I can tell by the way he pushes his eyebrows down and together in a “V.” I stroke his arm, remembering too late that adding more movement will just make his misery worse. “You want music?” I ask. He frowns again, eyes still closed. Finally, I shut up, helpless — because there is nothing I can do. I know this too well. And helpless because I’m quickly becoming as overtaken with dizzy, jutting, lurching movement as he is.
I know exactly how bad he feels, which makes me feel worse. I reach out, not steadily, and gently lay one finger on his hot, damp hand. I know it’s all he can tolerate while he’s working so hard, in his head, to find his own balance. It’s something he has to do alone, with all his might, and if he could speak, I know he’d tell me just this.
So I sit beside him; I touch him with my smallest finger. Though I want to swaddle him, I leave him alone. Sometimes that’s all we can do when someone we love is dizzy and reeling. Sometimes we have to hope it’s enough.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
