Essay

The Flight Into Maturity

By: Mary Gray Kaye, 1/17/2012 8:24:53 PM

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When I turned the key in the front door lock, I did shudder a bit. But I quickly recovered. The rooms behind that door were often dark and empty after work on Friday. What was so different about this Friday night?
    Well, it was different. I had just come in from a long nonstop Mexicana Airlines Guadalajara/ Chicago flight. I had just ended a marriage. I took the flight home alone, carrying my own bags. I entered my apartment alone. Again.
    Was I scared? Sad? Remorseful? Bitter? No. I was sure. I was finally grown up. Alone and all grown up, taking care of myself. Making the important decisions that would shape the rest of my time on earth by myself with only my own brains, experience and emotions to guide me. I was in full bloom. The major decision was not set in concrete. I could always go back to Mexico where he and I had tried out foreign living in a mountain community as our retirement territory. There I could resume the marguerite-infused expat life we were leading, hanging in bars with the dysfunctional discontents we seemed to have attracted. I tired early and easily of that life. Maybe I was beginning to grow up there, realizing I was contributing nothing to my development nor to my society.
    “Haven’t we given enough?” he would argue. “Four kids fed, clothed, educated and sent into the world well-equipped?”
    Yeah. Four kids all on the thresholds of their own promising lives and me seventeen hundred miles out of their loop. A wait of three days to get on a working phone line into the States. Mail availability at the local postman’s will. No fax. Pre-email. I was grateful we had running water. Me with no Spanish, most of those around me with no English. What made me think this would be a fitting reward to decades of white collar labor?
    As soon as I had made the very grown-up decision to return to my Midwest home I joined in a line for an available public phone to place a call to the airlines and a confirmed reservation. A single, one-way reservation. His “grown up” decision was to stay, giving up among other things the strong ties to the Great Lakes states where we both were reared and to all the people that inhabited them. His rewards were a rustic, primitive community, total immersion in a language he loved, lazy days and year ‘round sunshine. Mine were my children, eventually their children, my career, chaotic city life and four seasons that included scorching heat and freezing cold with their seasonal sweltering or shivery breezes off the lake. Who made the better decision? Depends on who answers that question.
    But I made it without much regret until I first looked around at my life that original Friday night back in my apartment alone. Where were those who had been watching my back? Where was my mother who gave me a nickel every time I did something courageous? A nickel for asking a policeman for directions. A nickel for reciting a poem in a third grade Thanksgiving program. A nickel for asking a boy to a girls’ school dance. A nickel for having a baby.
    Where was my father who served me oatmeal and fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning then drove me to school silently except to wish me the best day ever as he dropped me off at the door? And who picked me up quietly from parties where unsophisticated drinkers were too smashed to take me home?
    Where was my brother who was immediately sent after me when I ran away from home in a pre-adolescent huff? Then he was a block behind me, stalking my every move, getting closer as dusk began to settle in.
    Where was that high school English teacher who convinced us that we were strong, bright young women with no challenges we could not meet, who opened up our minds to inventive thinking?
    Where was that boss who took me the first day out of college and treated me like a colleague, equal to him and his staff in ability and ingenuity?
    All gone. To other lives, to other worlds.
    So here I was with mine, all mine, to do with as I was able, excited and proud to have finally grown up. So previously protected, it never occurred to me to have tried this leap into grownupness before, this leap into its challenges and benefits, its responsibilities, its uncertainties, but most of all, the pride of ownership of one’s own life that maturity bequeaths.
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