Families Weekend, Part 1: Separation Anxiety
In which an empty nester sets off to reunite with her no-longer-small human.
Last week, I flew halfway across the country to see my son for his university’s Families Weekend, an event held about a month after Freshman Orientation to let parents see their kids in their new academic habitat. The idea is to reassure parents that their kids are doing just fine—thriving, even!—without them.
When the topic of Families Weekend came up earlier this summer, C suggested that my husband and I didn’t have to come. I hesitated for about three seconds and then registered for the event anyway.
I knew I’d miss my son, an only child, when he went off to college, but I didn’t realize how much. Despite how busy I was with client work and finishing a revision of my novel, I missed C coming into my bedroom 15 minutes before I went to bed to give me in-depth reports on the Oakland A’s dumpster fire of a season or the latest Stanford Football recruiting news. I missed him asking me “What’s for dinner?” EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. I missed him dragging me away from my computer to binge-watch Bad Sisters or Mr. Robot or whatever series we were watching.
The six weeks between drop-off and Families Weekend seemed like six months.
My trip didn’t get off to a good start. For one thing, the flight was completely full. Who were all these people going to Houston in the middle of the week, in September? Thanks to a generous friend who has about a million frequent flier miles, I was on the waitlist for an upgrade, but the 48 (!) seats in United First Class checked in full. As I made my way back to Economy, I got to see what I was missing: comfortable pods with leather seats and private TV screens, each passenger separated by a wavy blue partition.1
Our plane was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner—a lovely plane, I must say. In Economy, we sat nine across: three seats on one side of the plane, then an aisle, three middle seats, another aisle, and three seats on the other side. I’d chosen an aisle seat (I drink gallons of coffee and have to get up to pee a lot) in Row 33F in the middle section of Economy Plus (I have long legs, so back off). In the hierarchy of aircraft boarding, I was in Group 2, so at least I had overhead space for my carry-on. When you drop to Groups 3-5, things get a little dicey.
Just as I’d settled myself into my seat, tucking my water bottle, Kindle and customary good-luck copy of People magazine into the seat pocket back in front of me, there was a slight commotion in the aisle. The woman in the middle seat of the row across from me had been assigned a seat separate from her two travel companions, and now they were deeply involved in trying to get other passengers to switch seats so that they could sit together. It seemed that they were unable to withstand being parted from each other during the three-and-a-half-hour flight.
The woman (I’ll call her Friend #1) asked the pleasant man in the aisle seat across from me if he would switch with her other friend (Friend #2). He glanced to the back of the plane, where Friend #2 (possibly a boyfriend, but who could say?) was sitting, and politely demurred.
Another young woman took the middle seat next to me. She opened the airline-provided sanitizing wipe and carefully wiped down every surface in front of her: the screen, the tray table, the pocket with the little sign that said “Literature only.” Our row now smelled like a hospital. She leaned forwarded and began mouthing something to Friend #1. Uh oh. This, then, was Friend #3 sitting next to me.
I felt her glancing at me. I braced myself. I opened People and pretended to be engrossed in a profile in which Gwen Stefani—who I feel certain hasn’t had to worry about carry-on space in many years—extolled the virtues of her simple life in Oklahoma with Blake Shelton.
“Excuse me, would you be willing to switch seats with my friend?” she asked. I didn’t know what row her friend was in, but I did know the row number was much higher than mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said with all the faux regret I could muster. “But I paid extra for this seat.” Which was true.
Look, I’ve been groomed to be a “nice” person. Laid back, even (on the surface). But I wasn’t going to relinquish my upgraded seat so a woman could sit next to her boyfriend for a three-and-a-half-hour flight. Truth be told, even if it had been a much longer flight, I wouldn’t have switched.2 Still, I prayed she wouldn’t make a scene.
“Oh,” was all she said. “Okay.”
There! I’d done it. I was politely assertive, and all would be okay. In fact, Friend #1 across the aisle had managed to convince some guy in the back of the plane to switch with her. He plopped, shrugging, into Friend #1’s newly vacated seat. So at least two of the three seat-hopping friends had been reunited. Huzzah!
In fact, as soon as the plane took off, Friend #3 next to me fell asleep. See! If she was going to sleep during the entire flight, my refusal to switch seats didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
At some point during the flight, the passenger on the other side of Friend #3 got up to use the bathroom. She left her tray table down, her empty cup the only item on it. Friend #3 woke up and decided that she needed to use the bathroom, too, but instead of exiting our row via the empty seat to her left, she unbuckled her seat belt and turned toward me in the universal gesture for “Move, I need to pee.”
I looked down at my tray, which bore the remnants of my packaged snack, a half full can of Coke Zero (the other half now soaking the aisle carpet after an unfortunate encounter with my elbow), and my Kindle. I started to find places for all these things, while the seat on the other side of Friend #3 was perfectly empty. I sensed I was being punished for my unwillingness to give up my upgraded seat.
Finally, Friend #3 gave up. “That’s okay,” she said, and went out the other way.
That wasn’t the last time that day I encountered someone with separation anxiety. Unfortunately, the next person to display it was me.
Is this sadism on the airlines’ part or are they merely encouraging us to be aspirational? As in, “If you fly more and charge more on your United credit card, here’s what you might experience someday?” Discuss.
True confession time: My reluctance to switch assigned airline seats with strangers is partially due to my subconscious and deeply neurotic fear that if, God forbid, the plane went down, my body would never be identified because I was sitting in the wrong seat.
The hijinks on planes these days are extra. Good for you for keeping your seat. ❤️
You can tell how much people suck on a crowded plane.