I used to slip out in the middle of the night to catch the 5:30am flight to the client-of-the-moment. Or I’d drop Sosie off at school and after an extra long hug and big kiss, I’d take off and leave it to Daddy to both pick up and pick up the pieces in my absence.
But I always thought she knew. Even at six months when I started to pick up travel again after her birth, she had a sixth sense for my vanishing act. Those early pre-flight mornings were the only mornings she woke up for a midnight snack. It’s like she could smell the suitcase, the lunch and dinner prep, the incessant note writing and just wanted one more cuddle before I shipped off.
Now it’s a different ballgame. Sure, I still pack the lunches and ready the dinners. But I no longer hide the suitcase. And before I go, I can actually tell Sosie that I have to go to work tonight, but I’ll be home tomorrow. And then she launches the first of her many prickly arrows, landing deep, deep, deep in my heart: “But I don’t want you to go.”
She understands that Mommy works. Now thanks to a new laptop with a video camera, she understands that Mommy sometimes works in weird hotel rooms with strange lighting schemes and sometimes in suites with nicer kitchen appliances than we own. She understands that I’m away and that I miss her and that I’ll come home and that we’ll sink back into our normal routine again. After all of this growing up she’s busy doing every day, it’s still incredibly amazing to have these conversations with her and this level of understanding between us.
But she doesn’t quite fully understand yet the difference between “want to go” and “have to go.” We’re working on that one together because, frankly, I don’t think I fully understand it either. Seems like in a perfect world they wouldn’t be able to coexist, no? Or perhaps in a perfect world, they would mean the exact same thing.
Presentation? Smashing. PowerPoint? 100% finalized and blessed. Flight #1? Caught an earlier one out of ATL by the skin of my teeth (they literally closed the cabin door behind me.) Available in-flight garnishes for my club soda? Both lemons and limes.
I think I’ll go out of my way to request a room on the 13th floor from now on.
I thought hotels and other public buildings into which you walk on a daily basis and to which you entrust your life eliminated their 13th floors. Or is that just an urban myth generated to create plot points for Stephen King novels?
But the thing is, I could really use a little luck right now. In the next 24 hours I’m ATL > BOS > LAX. And along the way I have to give a presentation to about 50 global brand managers on a process and deliverable that I’m only about 37% familiar with. And that PowerPoint that kept me up last weekend? The one that I stayed up until 5am this morning revising (just as I predicted)? That’s going to the company’s EVP for review tomorrow, which probably means a few (hundred) frantic morning phone calls to finalize.
The thread that’s holding it all together for me is my two monkeys who are no doubt sleeping soundly at home. And how at this time tomorrow the three of us will be slipping off to five days in a sunny, warm paradise together. Well, them and the egg over easy, bacon, toast, and coffee that will be delivered to my door in roughly 5 hours. With all of that going for me, who need a lucky number?
