Helicopters and Mullets
Blog 2 - Helicopters and Mullets
Today is another special one, because you’re meeting one of the key players in our story, and in my life. One of my siblings. I mentioned in my last blog post that my father is passed. Well, one of the things he left for me (besides an expensive therapy bill) was six siblings. Six. He was a very busy man. We don’t all share the same mother. In fact, I only have one that shares my mother, and he had three other baby mamas besides her. I’m getting off track.
A couple of weekends ago, I took my youngest sibling, Rory, to the winery in town with Matthew and Beth. She’s 14 years old, and she definitely has that Gen Z disorder that they all have in common- the one that makes them look like they’re old enough to have a 401k and a Master’s degree. I think that they put a growth hormone into TikTok videos. She is seriously so beautiful and grown up that sometimes I forget that she is just a kid, you know? Anyways, we’re sitting at a picnic table discussing Matthew and Rory’s terrible love lives. I’m about half a glass of cabernet deep when I look over to see a helicopter landing in the field beside the grape vines. The conversation went a little like this:
Me: “Hey, are they giving out helicopter rides?”
Beth: “Go ask. Hey, I think I matched with that guy who has the mullet on Tinder last night!”
Matthew: “I’m going to get another Michelob.”
I looked at Rory and she already knew what I was thinking.
Rory: “They probably won’t let me on without parent consent.”
Me: “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”
A few minutes later, we’re a thousand feet above the tiny county we’ve spent the majority of our lives in, and Rory’s face was lit up the entire time. It filled my heart with the kind of pride that only your kids or your siblings could ever fill it with. And this was important to me.
Flashback to little 18 year old Sally. I was boarding a plane to Europe right after graduation, and the closest I had ever been to an airplane was the airshow that me and Jackie had went to sophomore year, and even then I was scared. When you’ve spent your whole life in one place, it’s hard to imagine a world outside of that place. It’s harder to imagine that the world is bigger than just the people that you know and the places you’ve seen. Dad was blowing my phone up asking for the flight number so that he could track me all the way over the Atlantic Ocean. 9 hours, and Rory’s mom told me later that he barely slept a wink that night because he was obsessively checking on the plane. I got a whole 9 hours of the best sleep of my life on that plane ride.
I’m gonna take Rory to Europe one day. That’s why I got her on that helicopter. I don’t want her to be scared of the unknown like I was, and still am sometimes.
Beth never spoke to the guy with the mullet. We went to meet Ronaldo for pizza afterwards.
In another city not too far away, Jackie and Adam were on their weekend anniversary trip. When Inman was first born, it was like pulling teeth to get Jackie out of the house. She was scared of everything. Car wrecks, falling pianos, her shadow. That’s a normal thing to experience as a mother, especially after your first born. There are so many what ifs and so much unsolicited advice from other scared mothers. Cosleep, don’t cosleep, breastfeed, oh no you’ll be too tired to breastfeed, the chest clamp goes here, lock the cabinets, put the knives in a higher drawer, don’t let them eat gummy bears or the dyes will turn them into gremlins that you can’t feed after midnight. It’s a terrifying thing to have someone else’s life in your hands. Jackie is finally getting to the point where she can let the grandparents take over for a couple of days to get some much needed Jackie time. When they got home, she did tell me that a someone drowned right beside a bench where they had been sitting. But, hey, it wasn’t them.
After we got home that night, I couldn’t help but wonder, were we scared of being in the air, or just used to being on the ground? Is my irrational fear of driving on the interstate just that- irrational? Am I still scared to leave this place? Are we holding ourselves back? If Beth had walked right up to that mullet guy from Tinder, would they have had a couple of mullet babies and grown old together? When we put these limitations on ourselves, is it protecting us, or holding us back from what God or the universe really wants for us? Will it all just actually be fine?
Anyways, thanks for reading. Go do something crazy today, just in case.