“I don’t want to fly anywhere for college,” my daughter announced.
I was excited to hear this because it meant that she was beginning to think about what she wanted in a college. This was also an important criterion because it narrowed down the choices to colleges within driving distance of northern New Jersey. Of course, the length of driving distance was still up in the air. So I tried to get her to give me a sense of distance or hours away from home. She shrugged, the universal teenage mode of communication, which can mean anything from, “I don’t know,” to “I don’t care” and everything in between. I was pushing my luck.
A friend told me that her son had not wanted to fly either but he ended up attending Oberlin College, near Cleveland, Ohio. Her point was, kids will change their minds many times before it’s time to submit the application. I’m familiar with how quickly things change for teenagers but if I know my daughter, this is not something from which she will be swayed.
Her aversion to flying developed while we were living in Dublin, Ireland. We discovered that she would become airsick during flights, especially during take-offs and landings. A friend who suffers from similar problems told me about sea-bands, available from any drugstore. Using the ancient Chinese practice of acupressure, the sea-bands apply gentle and continuous pressure on a specific point between two tendons on the wrists. The treatment is painless, non-invasive and worked in curbing her nausea and discomfort.
Which was a big relief to me because we were planning to travel a lot. Because of Dublin’s location and cheap airfares offered by budget airlines Ryanair, two hours by plane and you could be sipping cappuccino in a piazza and admiring Michelangelo’s David. We wanted to see all these places where we had only previously dreamed of going.
Maybe it was a Pavlovian response but my daughter still did not like to fly despite the sea-bands. She did not look forward to our travels as much as we did, no matter how hard we tried to convince her that these were wonderful opportunities. In the end, I confess that my own desires to see the world trumped her desires not to fly and we dragged her along with us everywhere. And yes, I do feel a little guilty about it.
I think this time we will honor her “no-fly zone.”
Bound 4 College 