Settled

The woman in 11C is crying.  Monday night, American Airlines flight 1393 is behind schedule, somewhere over the Sierra Nevadas.  She’s been watching the movie Lion, and it’s the flush out the tear-ducts scene.  I’m in 12B, trying to feel anything but disconnected from family as I hurtle westward with a dozensome movies playing in front of me.  11C woman has picked a good one; the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Saroo Brierley’s A Long Way Home. 

Spoiler alert.  A Long Way Home / Lion tells the story of a boy who got lost when he was five.  He was transported hundreds of miles from home on a train he fell asleep on.  He spent a few terrifying weeks alone on the streets of Calcutta, before being rounded up and placed in an orphanage.  He was adopted by an Australian couple, and was living an outwardly comfortable but inwardly unsettled life.  After years of searching for something that looked like his memory of home on Google Earth, he traveled back to India and was reunited with his mother twenty-five years after he vanished on the train.  The woman in 11C is a mom, with what looks like a six or seven year-old son across the aisle in 11D.  Saroo has finally found his mom in the movie, and the mom in 11C is sobbing softly, as other passengers are laughing at what’s on their screens.

Can’t say I’ve ever watched a movie on a plane.  It seems too personal a choice to share with strangers.  I do the iPod / reading / laptop work thing, instead.  Road & Track has two columns from essayist hero Peter Egan this month, so that’s been keeping me distracted from the family separation growing at nine miles a minute.  But, between the crack of the 11B / 11C seats in front of me, I catch a glimpse of a kid in an orphanage, and get hooked into the movie.  Orphanages all look the same.  When Davenport drove me around for the first time, we passed the Annie Wittenmeyer compound.  I blurted out, “that’s an orphanage, isn’t it?”.  I was told it was, for Civil War orphans.  They asked if I wanted to take a look.

Hell no.  I’m going to break with my customary stand against swearing on this little outpost of the interwebs for a paragraph.  Hell no, I thought as they asked me.  “No thanks”, I said out loud.  I’d later find out the City owned the buildings, and supported a variety of adaptive re-uses in them.  A glimpse through the 11C / 11B seat crack at an Indian orphanage.  A glimpse out the window of the Davenport tour van at a Civil War orphanage.  They all look - instantly - the same.  The same as the one I was sent to.  They are - all of them - fucking terrifying.

Spoiler alert.  Life’s funny, and then it ends, is how all this goes.  Random 12B seat assignment with random drama-watching mom in 11C in front of me.  Random kid lost on a train thirty years ago, on the other side of the planet.  Random, random, random and - somewhere over the west slope of the Sierra Nevadas - the clarity hits you.  There’s a film because there’s a happy ending.  Movie mother and decades-lost son are reunited.  Plane mother lands at SFO and her son is asleep across the aisle.  She picks him up, hugs him tightly, and carries him off the plane.  No one loves you like mom loves you.  That’s my guess at least, from what I've seen.

But I can’t say for sure.  I have no memory of it.  No movie for me.

I’ve got the father / son thing down, from both angles.  The brother / brother.  The husband / wife.  The father / daughter.  I have much to be grateful for, but I have no clear recollection of my birth mother.  My second mom, the woman I called mom, dropped me and my brother off at the orphanage when dad went to the TB sanitarium.  I kinda noticed, because it was hard not to, that my five step-brothers and step-sisters born to her didn’t share that car ride.  Years pass, out of the orphanage and mom is stricken with cancer and dad is disabled and I’m working full-time at age twelve.  Embrace the suck, as they say.    

So I Google-learn this week there is something called “Attachment Theory”, and I learn this week that it’s a really really good idea to for kids to have strong and secure attachment to their parents when they’re young or things can go a little haywire for life and I add what I learned this week to what I know and there’s this.  I never asked dad if I was close to my birth-mother.  I never pried for details about why they divorced.  I never asked about how it all came apart, and we set out to live Courtship of Eddie’s Father for real.  I never asked about how he met mom or why I got deposited at the orphanage and her children didn’t.  I never asked because he did the best he could and tuberculosis wasn’t his fault and I didn’t want him to feel bad and out of the orphanage into a house with a dying mom and disabled dad and full-time work in high school what would the answers matter anyway. 

You pour a new theory into the mix, you put the thinking cap on.  Attachment.  Was there an attachment?  Or wasn’t there.  Was it broken?  Or did it ever exist?  I understand how Saroo’s mother never moved away, never gave up hope that her son would find her.  I can’t begin to understand how a parent - or two, in my case - gives up a child.  I do know this.  I attached to something.   

Spoiler alert.  I attached to the future.  Through a divorce I can’t remember.  Through the wheelchair, orphanage and every less than Leave It To Beaver day that followed.  Through setting out for college with $83.  Through moving communities stagnant in their fear to better places.  Through westward flights to lonely nights.

Hug your children tightly.  Each day, is made anew.