Untamed

One morning, in the middle of the divorce, I called Liz to ask for parenting advice. Liz doesn’t have children, so she is still sane enough to have perspective.

I said, “I know, I know, I know that all is well and everything is fine at the deepest level and all that shit. I know all of that. But I don’t know it today. I’m worried that I ruined them. They’re confused and afraid, and for Christ’s sake this is the one thing I swore I’d never do to them.”

She said, “Okay, Glennon, here is what I see happening: Your family is together on an airplane right now. You are the flight attendant, and the kids are passengers on their first flight. The plane just hit some serious turbulence, and the airplane is bouncing.”

“Yes,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

“Okay. What do passengers do when turbulence hits? They look at the flight attendant. If the flight attendant appears to be panicked, the passengers panic. If the attendants are calm and steady, the passengers feel safe and follow suit.

“Glennon, you’ve been flying and living long enough to know that while turbulence feels scary, it won’t take the plane down. Turbulence isn’t deadly, and neither is divorce. We survive these things. The kids don’t know this yet, so they are afraid. They are going to keep looking at your face for information. Your job right now is to smile at them, stay calm, and keep serving the freaking peanuts.”

This is what I told myself every single day during the divorce, and a million times since: Keep serving the freaking peanuts, Glennon.

I was talking to a friend about this parenting mantra and she said, “Yes, turbulence doesn’t take planes down. But planes do crash. What if the thing that’s shaking your family’s plane is real? What if your family actually is going down?”

A friend of a friend found out a year ago that her teenage daughter was dying of cancer. That’s not turbulence. That’s the crash we all fear. That’s a family going down with the full knowledge that they won’t all make it out alive.

This woman started drinking and drugging, and she didn’t stop, so her daughter died while she was high. Her other two daughters watched their sister die without their mama present, because she had jumped ship. I think about this mother every day. I feel deep empathy for her. I also feel afraid for her. I fear that one day she will finally get still and that stillness will be so full of scalding regret that it will be impossible to stay.

We don’t control the turbulence or tragedy that happens to our families. The plot of our lives is largely out of our control. We decide only the response of the main character. We decide whether we will be the one who jumps ship or the one who stays and leads.

Parenthood is serving the peanuts amid turbulence. Then when real trouble hits—when life brings our family death, divorce, bankruptcy, illness—parenthood is looking at little faces and knowing that we are as afraid as they are. Parenthood is thinking: This is too much. I cannot lead them. But I will do the thing I cannot do.

So we sit down next to our babies. We turn their faces toward ours until they are looking away from the chaos and directly into our eyes. We take their hands in ours. We say to them, “Look at me. It’s you and me. I am here. This is more real than anything out there. You and me. We will hold hands and breathe and love each other. Even if we are falling from the sky.”

Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.