This is a big one. It's also not terribly funny and I struggled with blogging about it. But it's important for me to not only point the finger elsewhere, but also take myself to task.
I learned this lesson the hard way, and I know that this event will be a "jump out" for my son when he looks back at his childhood. Just as I remember my parents not allowing me to go on a class trip in 8th grade, so will he remember his mom's self-righteous indignation resulting in getting kicked off a plane on the way to Spring Break when he was in 2nd grade.
Here's what happened. The irony of this story is that the night before we were leaving, I'd gone to see "Friends With Money" and horrifyingly related to Frances McDormand's character and thought "I'd better watch my Ps and Qs" (well, it probably wasn't as platitudinous as that). Just because I think things would work much better my way, I wasn't running every single business on the planet and it was possible I looked like the jackass and those other people might have some clue as to what they were doing.
But twelve hours later I forgot all of that. Twelve hours later I was on an overcrowded plane. Southwest had changed their policies without alerting me (what?!), and I'd ended up in Boarding Group C. Inching our way to the back of the full plane, immediately paying the price for carry-on overpacking, there were no two seats together. I looked around, panicked (with my 8 -year-old and my abandonment issues) and wondered how I'd get through the flight 16 rows away from my son. I saw the harried flight attendant, and asked her gently -- okay, my version of gently -- if she would mind making a request to the rest of the passengers to switch a seat with a mom and her son.
Here's what happened next: no one heard her announcement, I asked her to repeat it, she berated me in front of the other passengers and my son for not having "wakened up early enough to get to the airport on time", and a nice woman near us offered up her seat. This mercifully put my son and me one row apart, both of us in aisle seats. I got us situated, seat belts fastened, cream cheese on his bagel, and then I stewed. I sat in my seat boiling, repeating her chastisement like a mantra in my mind. And that was the moment, that life-changing moment we've all faced, the moment in which I could have made an out-of-character decision (remember? last night? "Friends With Money"?) and I didn't. Instead, I got up, walked to the back of the plane and told "Amber" that I "didn't appreciate the way she spoke to me in front of my son and the other passengers". I said my piece, then sat down in my seat, ready for the flight.
The next thing I knew, my son and I were being escorted off the plane to the terminal, where the FBI waited with questions. "Amber" had decided to exert her power, and linked the word "threatened" to me. That's all it took. We were banished, our luggage brought to us and our flight cancelled.
In the end (phone calls, tears, my son's father demanding restitution, etc.), we were on a flight out the next day, apologies from the airline overflowing and only mild schedule irritations on the other end.
However, I knew that my self-righteous indignation, whatever its roots, caused the Event. Maybe it was time to look inward.
Maybe it was my business that needed some overhauling.
...or drunk or stoned or however you want to put it. There's just nothing that makes this alright. We've all slipped up at some point and had too much to drink. When you're spanning 20 or so years of drinking, the odds are you've worn a lampshade or over-shared with a semi-friend or woken up with that guy/girl who was a lot cuter at 2:00 a.m. (or so I've read about in books and seen in movies!).
