Sunday, April 28, 2013

Holding Pattern


Next month I will celebrate my 9th anniversary at Frontier Airlines. It’s hard to believe I have been a Flight Attendant for nearly a decade. It has had its ups and downs (pun intended), but I would not trade it for the world. I have traveled the world (29 countries and counting!), met the man of my dreams and boast friendships that will surely last the rest of my lifetime, long after I hang up my wings. 

There is a phrase in my industry that sums up my last 16 months: hurry up and wait. You hurry through security and wait in the boarding area. You hurry onto the plane and wait while the mechanics fix a computer glitch. You hurry to beat the impending elements, but the airport closes anyway due to nearby lightning. Your life becomes a series of frantic starts and stops.

My month is also broken into jarringly emotional starts and stops. Half the month is built in anticipation of something; the other half is spent in recovery of something. To be frank, you rev up your libido and pour wine and coordinate schedules and wait for the second line on the ovulation stick to appear and you hope and pray, and then you love. You plateau for a few days and rest before you spend the next couple weeks sidling down that very mountain you clambered up. And then your cycle--the cycle--begins again. 

“They” always say that waiting is the hardest part. And they are right. If I could know the following morning that our attempts the night before were futile, I could stand up, brush off, and go about my business relatively unscathed. But simple biology dictates that a two week wait is inevitable following ovulation. A mandatory pause button. Life in a holding pattern. 

Even as a small girl, I loved flying. I loved leaving somewhere (or something) behind and arriving in a completely different topography. I loved nestling into my window seat and gazing at the mirrored rivers that carve through the Earth’s surface knowing that-- in a few short hours--I would land. Arriving is imminent and the wait is over. 

There are no short-cuts on this journey, at least not for us. For some reason we are meant to endure detours and roadblocks. Maybe it will make the destination all the sweeter. I must believe that it will. I am a bird flapping my wings against gusty winds; I am a fish swimming against the current. It is incongruent to feel exhausted despite there being no forward movement. So we circle and we wait. We see the control tower in the distance and we are waiting for clearance to land. 


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