This started out as a reply in MMP. But I realized it was getting longer and longer, and didn’t belong there. It’s not really a rant, so it doesn’t belong in the Pit. But I have to get it out, so I can be nice to everybody for the immediate future. So I’m giving it it’s own thread. Just venting here, and if want to be mean to me about it, please just move along, cause life is hard enough, thanks.
Well, I survived my great adventure. (The trip from Vancouver to Cleveland for my daughter’s wedding which the MMP’ers would recognize from earlier posts) I am now posting from my eldest daughter’s (herein to be known as the Bride) computer. I had a long tiring but not terrible trip.
My husband rode with me to downtown Vancouver to catch the shuttle that would take me to SeaTac. The schedule told us that the shuttle would leave Vancouver at 7:00 pm, but it actually left at 6:30. We just happened to be walking back to the bus stop from the diner where we ate poutine (so all my new Canadian wouldn’t rub off while I was gone), but if we hadn’t decided to be extra early, I would have missed that shuttle. That was scarey in the “Well what the hell do I do now???!!!” kinda way.
Well, I made the shuttle and kissed goodbye the hubby. When I get to the border the custom’s agent asks why me and my husband don’t move to be together. Well, I couldn’t tell him that we pretty much were, and I was just coming back for a wedding and to handle getting a passport, so I just said we were going to eventually. But before we decided I should move to Canada, custom’s agents asked us this all the time. I always want to say, your job is to make sure we aren’t doing anything illegal, not marriage counseling!, but they are scarey people with all the power when you are making the crossing, so of course you are just nice & polite while you squirm and thrash inside. This applies to Canadian and US custom’s agents. They are all nosey, and not in a “are you smuggling drugs?” kinda way. Just in a “I can make you stand here all nervous and answer questions all day, just because I wanta” kinda way.
Anyway, they decided to let me back into my native land after all, and we all got back on the shuttle and made it to SeaTac after stops at some train station, and downtown Seattle where I got a lovely night time view of the space needle. We arrived at 11:00 pm. The check-in desk for my airline was closed. My flight left at 5:30 am, so there was no reason for employees, right? So, I spent the rest of the night in one of those uncomfortable chairs in front of the check-in area at SeaTac. With no US currency. Because I have always flown during the day before, but I think of an airport as a 24/7 kinda place. And I expect a place where foreign people come through to have facilities for exchanging currency. And maybe SeaTac does have them, but they are not available, or even visible if you are stuck in the lobby! And then check-in opens just in time to get all these anxious flyers through security and onto the plane, so there is no time to see if these places do exist and are open at 4:00 am. So, I am on my plane, but I have no usable cash.
My flight is in 2 parts. Seattle to Pheonix, and Pheonix to Cleveland. My mother is paying for this trip, because I can’t afford it, and it only seems right to all concerned that I should be present at the Bride’s wedding. She is my oldest baby, after all. So this is immensely generous of my mother and I have not one iota of room to complain. And if I had been able to check-in when I arrived at the airport, and if there were in fact money changing facilities available at all hours, (like when planes take-off and land) I wouldn’t even have the desire to complain.
But…my flight is on a low-cost airline that only serves meals to first class. If you are in coach you have to buy your own food. Which I can’t do, because I don’t have the proper currency. They don’t even offer that on the breakfast portion of my flight, which arrives in Pheonix at 8:30 am. (what time zone is Pheonix in? Mountain?) Then, my next flight which leaves at a gate far, far away loads at 9:00 am, so there is no time for wandering a strange airport: in search of…Currency Exchange. So, I jump on plane #2, which is when I find out that they won’t feed me unless I pay for it. I’ve been on the go for 24 hours already, I had a couple of brief dozes at SeaTac and on the first flight, but they are those non-resting head droops from exhaustion kinda sleep from which every noise or bump startles me awake.
So, yesterday I had a total of 40 airline peanuts to eat. I counted them. Not much sleep either. Finished my book before the 2nd plane landed. I did have plenty of beverages. OJ from a can on the first flight. This has a yucky metallic after taste and I will never drink it again. Then a can and a half of tomato juice on the 2nd flight, and some water to take my meds with. Normally I would have only drank water on the plane, but I figured I should have some nutrition value from my beverages. I’ve read the OJ thread, so I know it isn’t really all that good for you, but I didn’t know they had tomato juice as an option on the first flight, and I figured I could use the sugar if I was only going to have 20 peanuts on that portion of my trip.
OK, so I land in Cleveland. I’m hungry. I’ve worked pretty hard to get out of Cleveland, but here I am back again, anyway. Of course it is just for a few days for the wedding. Then it’s on to Philly while I get a passport, and I’m hoping temporary work to subsidize my visit and my application for residency when I get back to Canada. It means living with my Mother, which I’ve always announced wouldn’t even be preferable to living under a bridge. But, she is being incredibly kind and generous and I need to get over myself. It’s not that I don’t love her. I just have a hard time living with all the arguing, needling, poking at each other that is normal in my parent’s household. When I was a kid I used to pray that they WOULD get a divorce. There was no abuse, no real neglect. But all this free-floating hostility. Low grade, but constant. It was corrosive. Now my adult brother lives with them too, and has joined the hostility game. Such fun!
So, I’m not delighted with this trip, I’m worried about things, I’m exhausted and hungry. My son is supposed to pick me up from the airport, but the plane arrived early, and he thought I would have to do the custom’s thing in Cleveland, not realizing that I was flying in from Seattle, and not knowing that the flight stopped in Pheonix, either. So he’s late. And he’s brought his girlfriend, who I’ve never met, so there is some awkwardness, and I can’t really talk to him about his life and how it’s going which is a lost opportunity, cause I’m thinking I won’t get him alone at all this trip.
Then they inform me that we are driving out to Kent State to visit with daughter #2. Which is nice, and something that was on the game plan, but not for right off the plane. But nobody is home at the Brides place, where I am staying for a few days until I move into the motel with my mom and 2 of my brothers who are coming out for the wedding. So there is no place to put me until they come home from work. So it’s off to Kent we go, which is normally over an hour drive, and worse during rush hour which this is. They do stop at McDonalds where I pick up a cheeseburger, which the girlfriend very sweetly buys for me, because I still don’t have US currency, and my son is broke, because he had been laid off from his summer job. He is back on, and will continue to work there after school, (this is his senior year of HS, which started today) but summer is expensive when you are a teenager, and he’s broke. So now I have a little nourishment, and I no longer feel faint, but I’m still very tired.
We arrive at the campus, and daughter #2 shows us her dormroom, which is very exciting since this is my first child to go to college, and it hasn’t been easy getting her there, and we walk around some, but it is move in day, so it is hard to get around. My daughter moved in early, which was good thinking on her part. Her room is nice, very big compared to what I have seen in the past. Not at all bad for 2 people sharing, and I should be all enthusiastic, and full of questions, and wanting to see everything, but I’m just so tired I can’t think of any, so we go back early. We all say, well, I’ll see you this weekend at the wedding, but I still feel I am letting her down. I should be more on than this, Damnit! But it just isn’t possible. I am at least proud that I didn’t mention the National Guard, or memorials, which people of my generation are wont to do when Kent State is mentioned. No “Four dead in O-Hi-O” from me. Which is the least I can do. And I mean that literally. It is the very least I can do, and it’s all I feel I managed on this trip.
We finally get to the Bride’s apt. And she shows me all her shower booty, and all the table centerpieces, and napkins, and favors and stuff and I try to be enthusiastic, and then she asks if I have her childhood school pictures, which her father says I do, but I don’t, so she doesn’t have any school age pics for the collage she is making for the wedding. Of course, even if I did, I wouldn’t have brought them with me, cause she never said till I got here. I never had all the pics anyway, although her dad may have put them in the hope chest before he delivered it to me, but why would he put all the copies of each photo in there? Why wouldn’t he keep some of each? And why would he say I made him do that? Why would I want so many multiples of the same shot? Anyway they may be gone forever. The hope chest was stored at my sister’s place and she sold it when she moved. She said the contents are at my mom’s being stored now, and I hope that’s true. But if not, then all those memory things are gone. And it’s my fault for not taking better care of it all.
I’ll be glad when I can go back to Canada. Getting residency is going to be much easier than all this family stuff. I feel bad that I feel this way, because I do love my family, but I’m not good at their expectations, and I’m not good at not caring about not being good at their expectations. Thanks for listening. Or not, as the case may be. I don’t have any expectations about you guys, and you don’t have any about me! What a relief.