Kia ora lovely humans!
Recently we returned to Bali. It’s where we got married 10 years ago, only this time, we were going back with our two children - aged 4 and 7. It was going to be my birthday while we were there too. I held my expectations very lightly - knowing that travelling with kiddos is different to those pre-kid days.
On our flight out of Auckland, we went through a lot of turbulence. Probably the most that I’ve experienced in my life and then suddenly, there was a big flash of light, a loud noise and the power shorted in the plane for a split second. My husband and I (me sitting with the kids, him sitting across the aisle from us) exchanged a little panicked look. There was some nervous laughter and muttering throughout the cabin. There was radio silence from the captain and crew. “I think our plane just got struck by lightning…” is what I thought quietly to myself and then quickly dismissed it thinking I was spiralling.
The captain came over the loudspeaker about an hour later and said, “ahhhh…. As you may have been aware, we were struck by lightning. Planes are designed to withstand something like this. Everything from our side seems to be working just fine. Ground control says everything is working well from their side too. We’ll let you know in about 10 minutes what the plan is, for now, we’re still heading to Bali.” Then, some 20 minutes later, they let us know we’d be turning around and going back to Auckland as a precaution. What followed was hours of waiting either in queues, or on the phone, multiple emails, and a general hot mess trying to get ourselves on another flight, get our kids fed and organise somewhere to sleep.
Once the logistics were sorted, then came the thoughts of how we were going to support our kids to process this (and ourselves). My husband and I had taken different roles at the time, I remained calm, upbeat and optimistic and he worried about the bigger picture of our holiday and what would happen if we couldn’t get there for a week. These were not the usual roles we took in a crisis-like situation - it was usually the other way around.
After the kids were asleep, I rang my brother and boy did I vent! I realised that I really needed to express how that all was for me - even though I had held it together for the kids. Then I needed to complain - to express all of my rage and frustration at how poorly it was managed. I did this in the form of a 2 page complaint to the airline with 16 points on things they could have done better (fully acknowledging that they couldn’t prevent a lightning strike, but they could have navigated their response way better!). Expressing my feelings about it all gave me space to think about how we could help our children process it all too.
The next day, I said to the kids, “wanna play airplanes?” I sat on the bed and ushered one of them onto my lap. I pretended to be the aeroplane seat and I wrapped an arm around their waist as the seatbelt. I made a noise like I was announcing something over the loudspeaker and said we were experiencing some turbulence. Then I jiggled them up and down wildly on my lap. “Again! Again!” they laughed. They asked for it to get more and more hectic - “throw me onto the bed!” And they laughed more and more. My husband soon joined in and we had one on our lap each tossing them about. Finally, my husband said, “crash, flash! We’ve just been struck by lightning!” But this didn't get the same response from our kids. They seemed unphased by this bit, so we went back to turbulence where they kept laughing and asking for more. Then we turned the plane around (tilting them strongly to one side) announcing that we were returning to Auckland and we’d have to wait in a queue for hours to get a hotel. They groaned and moaned and expressed all of their frustration. And then, they were pretty much done!
It was interesting to me that I thought the stress/trauma point would be the lightning (probably because that was the scariest part for us as adults) and for the kids, the sweet spot for them was the turbulence. I felt like this was a deep lesson in trust and not assuming we know where the pain point lies for our kiddos.
There was no residual fear for our kids going on planes for the rest of the trip. It just became a story to all of us.
I love how Aware Parenting gives us the tools to navigate these kinds of situations with ourselves and our kids. I’d feel so lost without it!
Send me your questions:
I love to receive your questions - please email me if you’d like me to answer a specific question next month.
Māmā melody for the month and a bonus!:
The Māmā melody for this month is Too Sweet by Hozier, because I am obsessed at the moment and I used this song on my holiday to sing out and dance out the bits I wasn’t enjoying!
Thank you for being a part of my community. I appreciate you!
Sending you so much love and compassion,
Aroha nui,
Kirsty
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