The desert sun blisters the expanse of black top but I walk slowly, cutting sideways across the neat diagonal white lines. I stop once to check the locks on my uncle's huge Expedition that I maneuvered awkwardly into a two-sizes-too-small patch of shade under a pathetic parking lot tree. The Tucson International Airport's cool halls and deserted conversationally grouped chairs beckon. I have an hour before my sister lands and I am hardly ever alone like this.
I pay for a latte at the bar, reaching over the shoulders of more seasoned traveler's drinking bloody Mary's in a cluster, and take my book and my phone to a couch in an out of the way corner with a sweeping view of a runway.
In college, I worked in an airport and traveled all over the world with a backpack and an innate belief in my own invulnerability. I feel a great deal more vulnerable in the wider world today but airports still pique a strange mix of excitement and longing in the pit of my stomach.
I've stolen this hour only because my four kids and I are visiting my parents. My oldest two are attending an amazing camp at the Tucson Zoo that my Dad financed. My babies will hit golf balls with their Grandma this morning before diving into the golf club pool. And just for a minute, for this week, I feel the loss of all we didn't choose when Matt and I settled in a small Northern city thousands of miles from our families, our childhood friends, our past.
We have made wonderful connections in the frozen north. Friends that I text every day. Families who would do anything we needed at a moment's notice. We lack for nothing except this ease—the assumption that leaving kids with Grandma to pick up their Aunt is an “of course” instead of a favor. In Spokane, I would never ask for help in such a trivial, daily errand. I would load the kids in the car, herd them across the parking lot, skip the latte (maybe), put them on separate couches and then let the damage control begin. Please sit. Don't run. NO!
Or more likely, I would sit in the cell phone lot where I can leave the little darlings strapped into buckles, burning carbon and promising in my head to recycle more carefully in reparation.
I envy the good friends I've made who are living in their hometown with a grandma to call. It's a safety net we lack—the grandparents who do “camp” at the lake every weekend or the mother-in-law who watches the baby every Tuesday while the toddler goes to preschool—though they tell me having family close is not without its own difficulties and strings.
It's all choices and we have made ours in the same way a lot of families have. A clean start. A better job. A life of our own. Good schools. Low cost of living. We know the pros and cons but once a year I get a taste of all we've lost and it's priceless in so many ways.
I suppose I can put it much more simply: I love the life we've made on our own, but, oh my gosh, do I miss my mother.
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