Unaccompanied Minor

A free range child's adventures in shared custody

I am eight years old, carrying a Minnie Mouse suitcase and a stuffed orange cat through the airport flanked by two absurdly beautiful American Airlines stewardesses in crisp blue minidresses. It's the summer of 1981 and they’re as far from today’s “flight attendants” as Cindy Crawford is from bag of lettuce.

I’m wearing a Miss America style sash across my chest emblazoned with the words “Unaccompanied Minor,” which in retrospect sounds more like pedophile baiting than a well considered safety measure.

The Chicago O'Hare Airport is a Habitrail maze of gates and terminals, bustling with businessmen in big lapelled suits and bleach blonde retirees fleeing the Midwest to spend their vacations slathered in cocoa butter at some coastal beach resort.

I focus on the crowd rushing past me, mentally recording details to drown out the memory of my mother tearfully hugging me goodbye and the fact that I won't see her for two months, due to my parents’ custody agreement. But I'm determined not to cry in front of my fabulous stewardess pals.

They chat breezily over my head, occasionally pausing to flirt with the pilots who stride past us on their way to other gates. I'm transfixed by a massive diamond ring on the finger of the one holding my hand. I pretend we're just a trio of jet set career girls living the dream.

Later that night, sitting around their yellow floral patterned kitchen table, my grandparents ask me again if I'd like to be a stewardess when I grow up. I try not to sound offended when I tell them no, I want to be a movie star.

By the age of eight, I'd already flown enough to know I would never want to be a stewardess, but I have to admit these glamazons are giving me serious lifestyle envy, like a skyborne version of Julie McCoy the cruise director on The Love Boat. At Christmas, they'll be carrying fur coats over their arms as they ferry me to the arrivals gate of the Toronto airport where my dad is waiting.

Visiting my Canadian side of the family feels like traveling back in time to a Norman Rockwell postcard. My paternal grandparents were the perfect 1950s couple, with six kids and a suburban ranch house that looked like all the other ranch houses for miles, with manicured lawns and and two-car garages. So different from my hippie mother and beatnik artist grandmother, who drove us from Seattle to Sedona in a converted 64-seater school bus, our home on wheels.

For the next 10 years, I would imagine my twice yearly trips to Ontario as a grown up adventure. At 11, I graduated from “unaccompanied minor” to breezing into the airport like a celebrity on tour, wearing mildly inappropriate Madonna-inspired outfits and sporting a new hair color every year.

I was 13 when they first accidentally served me wine on the plane, back when wine came free with your meal and your meal came with actual silverware.

I always sat by the window near the front of the economy class section. On cross-country flights, by the end of eight hours in the air, the back half of the plane would be shrouded in a stale blend of cigarette smoke, 80s cologne and whatever flame retardant chemicals they used to treat the upholstered seats.

I would listen to The Cure and Dead or Alive on my CD Walkman, and read Stephen King novels between the salted peanut and cocktail hour and the in-flight meal. Sometimes grown men would chat me up and I liked to imagine they thought I was over 18.

A lot of Generation X people love to rag on their parents for letting them grow up feral in the streets, drinking water from garden hoses and staying out until the sun went down. But I never felt neglected or feral. Growing up in the free range 70s and 80s was awesome.

My parents were so fucking young when they had me, meeting in their early 20s, a couple of idealistic flower children, bringing a child into the world with the best of intentions and little else. They didn't wait to get their shit together before having me, didn't invest in a starter home, map out the best schools or schedule playdates.

Both of my parents are awesome people. My mother is an intellectual force of nature with Manic Panic turquoise hair, a former ballet dancer and environmental activist with a passion for teaching, currently working on her PHD. My dad is a talented musician and a kind, patient instructor who spends his days giving music lessons to students, gardening and playing in cover bands with a bunch of other guys in their 70s.

But despite compatible worldviews and creative personalities, their marriage only lasted a few years. By the time I was old enough to start school, they were divorced and living on opposite coasts with a border between them.

Did my parents’ hippie idealism and commitment to a life of artistic freedom lead me to believe that the world would embrace my creative endeavors, setting up unrealistic expectations for self-actualization and fulfillment totally out of step with the capitalist meat grinder of the modern workforce? Of course. But I can hardly blame them for that.

I never wanted kids of my own, but I have to wonder if the lessons my generation learned in trying to be better parents than their own, set them up to create a happier, more fulfilled generation or the exact opposite.

I felt self-sufficient at an age when most kids today aren’t even allowed to cross the street by themselves. I didn’t always feel safe growing up, but I always knew I was loved. I learned early that one of those feelings is an illusion, and the other is everything.