Flying the Not-so-friendly skies

We flew home from a two week trip to Virginia yesterday. Upcoming posts will share the fun of that trip. This post is for the flight home.

Flying from Northern Virginia to our home in the desert takes about 5 hours. In preparation for our journey, I had stocked the backpacks with tasty low-mess snacks, and quiet, yet exciting activities (new stencils, books, drawing/coloring books and new pencils/crayons). I charged the DVD player and packed up the DVDs most likely to garner universal praise. We arrived early at the airport with our boarding passes securely in the "A" group for our Southwest flight. Once we boarded the plane, we chose seats in the back 3 rows of the plane and hoped for an empty flight so that no one would be forced to sit amongst us. The flight attendant questioned why, when we were one of the first onboard, we would choose the worst seats in the plane (closest to the back bathroom and with seats that lean back the least). We tried to explain to him that proximity to the bathroom is key, but that we were choosing against traditional popularity in hopes of disturbing the fewest people. He kind of rolled his eyes and muttered whatever: the first of many exchanges that labeled him, for us at least, as least friendly Southwest flight attendant ever(LFSFAE).

We were pleased to find out that this flight would be traveling light and that it was possible that no one would sit near us. We assembled ourselves as follows: me and Bam first, with CE, Z and CW behind us and DH and M behind them. Some people came to sit in the rows around us, but not very many. We took off without incident.
Things were going smoothly at the beginning.




I took the above pictures as proof that the flight was going well. And then, because DH and the DVD player had everything in hand, I snuggled into the corner of the now empty first of three rows to nap, since the downside of the vacation was very little sleep for one mommy, culminating in a killer migraine on Monday whose effects I was still feeling on the plane.

Every ingress and egress I would make from my row, no matter how slightly I would nudge the severely reclined seat of the person in front of me, he would give me dagger looks. I ignored them, I was doing the best I could and really, when you insist on fully reclining, I figure you accept the possibility that nudging may occur.

At some point, things to the rear of me went slightly south, as things among siblings often do. I gave up on hopes of more than a catnap and separated the bickering parties--bringing CW up with me. This, of course, involved more seat nudging and the inevitable seat kicking by CW. This is where my neighbors in the row ahead of me LOST THEIR MINDS. The woman of the couple began to go on at great length how their son was in the ICU and she had only slept 2 hours the night before and desperately needed to get some sleep (I didn't question the two cups of coffee I had seen her guzzle previously) and that I and my family were making this impossible. Her husband just kept giving nasty looks. I apologized for her troubles and said that I was doing the best that I could. She demanded to know why we couldn't just leave her alone (they chose their seats in full view of where we already were, remember?) She asked why we had to spread out among so many rows and I said, there are 7 of us. She asked why I couldn't make all the children sit by themselves in the back. I said, they will scream then. She held out her earplugs and said that she didn't care about the screaming, she could handle that and what did it matter, they (the kids) were already screaming regardless of seat placement. I said, but other people on the flight might care about the screaming and I was trying my best to accomodate everyone on the flight and not just her. She then got really unpleasant and demanded that we give her a buffer of an entire row free from Fears family members. Just give me a buffer she said over and over again; I just need a buffer. At this point a woman across from me, seated by herself, offered to switch places with CW and me and I gratefully accepted granting the grumpy twins the buffer so badly requested.

At no point did the LFSFAE attempt to intervene, offer help or suggestion. At no point did the grumpy twins attempt to find a quieter, nudge free place to sit elsewhere in the plane. I spent the rest of the flight trying even harder than I usually do (and I really do try very hard--on or off airplanes) to keep the kidlets quiet, to quell their natural kidlike noisiness and restlessness. I was very anxious and more non-confrontational than is usually my nature. We survived. And thankfully we caught a lovely wind of some sort allowing us to land about one hour early. Blessings from Heaven!! I thanked the kind lady who switched with us profusely again and we went on our way.

The thing is, despite, or perhaps because of my inherently non-confrontational nature, things like my fight with the grumpy twins tend to fester and I have found myself arguing and muttering to myself in the interim. I want to impute only the best of motives to the grumpsters and believe that they actually have a son, that he is in the hospital and that all the things they said are true. DH questions all of it. I want to believe that they were just so overcome with worry and grief and lack of sleep that their usual rational nature was overcome by self-absorption. The thing is, I tend to believe that they must, even in their saner moments, lean a bit toward self-absorption. Because otherwise, it would seem an unusually big leap to suddenly insist that the world bend to your whims, merely because some bad luck had befallen your loved one and you were worried and sleep deprived.

I don't like that I let exchanges such as these get to me. I like even less that merely witnessing the exchange made CE worried and sick to her stomach for the rest of the day. I want to go back in time and calmly explain to the couple the legal concept of "coming to the nuisance." This basically says that if you saw the problem beforehand and chose to barrel ahead regardless, you don't get to complain. In lawsuits, this concept is used to bar people from moving in next to an already functioning city dump and then sue complaining of the smell. In our situation, it means that because we were there first, the grumpy twins can't choose to sit next to us and complain that we continued to be a large family filled with young irrepressible children. But I can't go back in time, I can only be grateful that the flight is over, we are safely home and that a nice woman willingly volunteered to be the human buffer between the mean people and us.

And I wonder why traveling wears me out.