Like a Living Room for Everyone

“Even though we’re stuck here, we’re having pretty much fun,” Clayton says. “It’s cozy.... Like a living room for everyone.”

We are in the Greenville airport, on our way to Florida for a trip to the Magic Kingdom. All week I have fretted about this flight, which was scheduled to depart after the kids’ bedtimes. What had I been thinking when I booked it? Now we are delayed for hours; we won’t get to Tampa until the middle of the night.

“The middle of the night?” Dee Dee asks. “Literally?”  It is her favorite new grown-up word. Yes, literally.

I have expected over-tired kids, grumpy and desperate for their beds. But everyone is amazingly cheerful. They tactfully ignore the make-shift pillows I construct out of jackets and stuffed animals.

“What would we be doing now?” they ask again and again, amazed that normally they could sleep so long.

A few families with babies are stranded with us, and I watch the moms with a mix of envy and relief. During my solo trips to Florida when the kids were small, I could feel the adrenaline pumping through me long before I arrived at the airport; I was in a state of combat the entire trip. In comparison, travelling now feels like a piece of cake. Still, I watch the babies peacefully asleep in their moby wraps and strollers and am wistful for the time when my babies could sleep anywhere, and when I was all they needed.

I am not really fooled by my own longing. I remember a hike through the Minneapolis airport with Clayton and Dee Dee in the double stroller and Sylvia in the Ergo. My feet ached and my back sweated and all my mental energy was fixed on willing my children to sleep. Now I sit with my mouth hanging open while Don and the kids take crazy pictures with his Ipad.

By the time we arrive in Florida, all three are asleep. I can’t stand to wake them, so I hoist the dead weight that is Dee Dee into my arms and lug her off the plane. Don has more sense. The other two walk through the airport half-asleep, then collapse at the baggage claim. The airport is deserted but for a few straggling passengers and the heap of bodies, backpacks, and booster seats that is our family.

The roads are deserted. We should make it to my parents’ house in record time, but a road closure forces us down a street I am sure I have never seen before. My eyes are blurry from too long in my contacts and I can’t read the street signs, but at last we arrive. It is almost two in the morning. Don and I carry the sleeping kids inside to their beds. As they stretch out into the horizontal comfort of their air mattresses, a tension inside me eases. They are still in their clothes and their teeth are unbrushed, but for the first time all night I don’t feel guilty: they are safe in their beds at last.

Relieved, I pick up my toothbrush. It is a few seconds before I realize that the paste I have squeezed from the small travel tube in my washbag is not toothpaste, but anti-itch cream. I spit frantically into the sink.

I confess that I have not been on board about this trip. There are all the reasonable reservations: the expense, the distance, the impossibility of avoiding the madding crowds. But some of it is mere snobbery. Are we really no different from the gazillion other American families that have no better sense than to spend huge amounts of time and money on a vacation so cliché?

It doesn’t even feel like a vacation. It feels rather like one more hurdle to leap in the steeplechase of affluent parenting. Homemade organic baby food? Check. Enroll the kids in swim lessons? Check. Trip to Disney World? Check.

That is, that’s how it has felt to me. Don and the kids are brimming with excitement. We have bought our tickets, chosen our fast passes. Sylvia wanted to meet Elsa and Anna, but even though we have made our selections almost a month before the trip, the only available times are in the middle of the night-- literally. She settles for Rapunzel and Cinderella, I nudge Dee Dee into choosing Peter Pan’s flight, and Clayton-- big surprise--picks the Haunted Mansion.

Because of my skepticism about the so-called vacation, I am well-poised to blame Don for the whole thing when the trip derails. As the plane bounces through turbulence at take-off, I am sure we are all going to be killed-- and whose fault will it be? As Dee Dee fusses and fidgets against me, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep, I absolve myself of guilt. This wasn’t my idea!

The thing is-- the trip never does derail. The plane doesn’t crash. Dee Dee eventually falls asleep. The next day the kids seem hardly the worse for wear after their late night and disjointed sleep. They have slept, on and off, for only eight hours-- and yet they survived! To me, with seven years of being obsessed with their sleep under my belt, it feels hardly short of miraculous. We spend a great day at my parents’ house, enjoying the Florida sunshine and the garden; Clayton even goes for a brief, frigid swim.

And yet all that pales on Sunday, when we finally arrive in the Magic Kingdom. Even in the parking lot, we are ecstatic. We are in Disney World! So are thousands of other people; together, we swarm towards the parking tram. It is impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. Each year, three times as many people visit Disney World as the Sistine Chapel or the Grand Canyon. There is something inexplicably exhilarating about being one of them. When the castle comes into view from the ferry we take across the lake, the children screech with excitement. I smile, a little sheepishly, at Don. We haven’t even entered the park and already I have been proven absolutely, utterly wrong.

We ride the rides, catch the end of a Mickey Mouse show, watch the parade. It is all so undeniably false, from the fake princesses to the fabricated Main Street. Much to Sylvia’s disappointment, you can’t actually go inside Cinderella Castle, and when we see Rapunzel’s tower I can’t help thinking of Camelot in Monty Python’s The Search for the Holy Grail and muttering, “It’s only a model.”

But somehow, it doesn’t matter. It’s expensive and it’s fake and I still don’t think that a trip to Disney World should be some kind of mandated right of passage. But it is magical nonetheless. When Merinda from Brave smiles and waves right at me from aboard her extravagant float, I can’t help choking up a little. Riding Thunder Mountain Railroad with Dee Dee and Sylvia beside me, I can clearly remember riding it (my first roller coaster ever) with my mom when I was little-- my mom who never rode roller coasters. And gazing down at the London lights from our Peter Pan pirate ship, I can almost feel my grandmother’s presence beside me.

Our trip home goes no smoother than the one there. We are stuck in the St. Petersburg airport for over six hours. But the other travelers are familiar faces from the flight down, and soon enough they’re friends.

“They’ll be calling me Uncle Keith by the time we leave,” a neighbor jokes.

The airline orders pizza and gives away free drinks. The girls watch a Tinker Bell movie, their new Disney fairy souvenirs in hand. The kids listen to books, brush their teeth in the airport bathroom, and obediently try--and fail--to go to sleep in the nest I make for them underneath our seats. Sylvia watches a newborn baby for hours-- literally-- and Clayton entertains our new friends with his self-taught Irish dance techniques.

“This is as much fun as Disney World,” Clayton tells me seriously.

I gape at him. “Really?”

“Well, almost.”