A Chick in the Cockpit (12 page)

Brad was bursting with excitement and emotion. Usually joking and teasing the nurses, holding his baby girl moved him to tears and silence. He could hardly speak as a new range of emotions he'd never experienced before flooded his mind and body. His face was framed with joy and pride. Since I was recovering from a birth and a surgery, Brad proudly carried her for as long as the nurses would allow. He held her, sang to her, and told her that he would always be there to protect her. He was kind, gentle, and healing to me. He helped me take a shower and brushed my hair as we conspired to get out of the hospital as soon as possible so we could block out the world and be at home with our baby.

We left the next morning, and it was the safest car ride we've ever taken. Brad came to full stops at the stop signs and went ten under the speed limit. We were giddy with joy. Neither of us could believe what a little six pound baby could do to our souls. You just want to be a better person once you've held your own child.

We named her Lindsey, and she had already traveled thousands of air miles before ever taking her first breath. She was blue eyed, strong, and colicky. My mom reminded me that I was colicky, too, and that it was poetic payback. I felt horrible that I couldn't soothe her. Each time she reached that level of hysterical crying where I thought I would start crying hysterically, too, I would run through my checklist. Has she been fed, does she have clean diapers, soft clothes, burped, still breathing? Yes to all. I finally learned that sometimes she was just going to have to cry. And she cried and cried and cried! There is nothing worse than being sleep deprived for days on end and have a baby that can't tell you what's wrong except by crying. It's their only warning system, and they don't come with clear indicator lights.

It was the eighth night of Lindsey's life that my husband first hit me. It was sudden and shocking, and it didn't come with a warning light.

On this eighth night, Brad had gone to bed about 9:00 p.m. and Lindsey usually started her colic fits about then. It was now 2:00 a.m., and I had not been to sleep yet. Lindsey had gone from crying to cooing to nursing to crying again. I had not had more than two hours of sleep in a row over a week and my brain hummed from the torture.

I was trying to let Brad sleep because he had to go to work in the morning, but our small three-level mountain home was open and airy, and sound carried well—and Lindsey had hit a rather high pitch. I had just given her a warm sponge bath, put her in clean diapers and clothes, and she nursed about twenty minutes. There was nothing else to do except to let her cry it out before she fell asleep, but unbeknownst to me, Brad was tossing and turning unable to sleep with the crying.

I was walking her around her room with her head on my shoulder when Brad came in, bleary eyed and angry. He didn't say a word as he just walked over and took her from me. For a moment, I thought he was going to walk her around for me. He'd helped walk her around on the previous nights, so I just handed her over. What actually happened is that he put her down on the changing table to change her dry diapers. The moment he laid her down, her crying intensified to hysteria. I immediately walked over and tried to explain. “I just changed her. She has dry diapers. She just needs to finish crying this one out, so please don't get her more worked up. She just needs to be comforted so she can relax and fall asleep. Stop! Don't take off her pajamas! What are you doing?”

While I was explaining this to him with a draining amount of patience, I had walked up behind his left side and was looking over his shoulder to see what he was doing and to try and convince him to stop undoing the clothes and diapers that I had just put on her. I'm sure my tone was not kind; I was at my wit's end, but at that moment, I felt his elbow wallop into my cesarean section incision with such force I dropped to the ground. He looked over me and said, “Don't ever fucking tell me what to do. You can't get her to stop crying so you must be doing something wrong, and I can't wait any longer to find out what the hell is wrong with her! What's wrong with you that you can't get her to stop crying? You're her mother for Christ's sake!”

With this, he plopped Lindsey back onto the changing table, stepped over me to get out of the room, and went back to bed. He left Lindsey screaming on the changing table and he left me on the ground with half my incision peeled open and bleeding. I lay curled in a ball for what seemed eternity before I felt I could move again. I looked down and my nightgown was covered in blood, but all I could think was that Lindsey was crying so hard, she might fall off the changing table.

When I attempted to stand up, I thought it quite possible that my guts would drop out—the pain was mind-numbing. C-sections feel like that anyway, and as I lifted my nightgown I was relieved to find my guts intact, but saw that the wound was bleeding badly. Thankfully, it didn't appear to be anything worse than some stretched stitches. I put a diaper on it and applied pressure. It stopped bleeding after about twenty minutes. I self-diagnosed that since it stopped bleeding, I must be okay.

I wasn't okay. Not in any sense of the word. I had never been hit before. Sure, my sister and I took swings at each other when we were kids, but it wasn't in the scope of my imagination that this man whom I loved and adored would do this to me, especially when we had just had the most incredible experience of bringing a baby into the world. We were supposed to be a team for better or worse. These things only happen to other women who do bad things. Or those who live in trailer parks or low-income housing units. I was so naïve. My mind started taking inventory of what bad thing I had done. I talked it over with my internal committee (we all have one, have you talked to yours lately? It's usually the justification committee that I ended up talking to) and they were confused, too.
He must've been so tired he just had no idea what he was doing. We're both so tired we can't think straight. He'll apologize in the morning. He'll tell me something to make it okay. It has to be okay. You just had a perfect, beautiful baby with your husband, and you are a team. There were no warning lights and your cruise checklist is supposed to be nothing but smooth flying. He's never hit you before, and there is no way he's going to hit you again. Our life is just too perfect. Why in the world would he get so angry to actually hit me?

When the sun rose the next morning, Lindsey was still sleeping, so I was, too. I didn't hear Brad leave the house so I awoke to find the bed empty. I thought he must be feeling badly for what he'd done. I was sure he'd left a note downstairs or something to let me know he was sorry. There was nothing. He said nothing. He came home that day and I had dinner ready, and we ate, and he said nothing. I said nothing. It was the beginning of nothing, nothing, nothing....

14
Engine Fire, Failure, or Separation Checklist

1.
Fly the airplane

2.
Fly the airplane

3.
Fly the airplane

4.
Land

If you're reading this checklist, the proverbial shit has hit the fan. Try taking a deep breath and remember one thing; just fly the airplane. Your main goal at this point is to control the airplane in a forward path and then, if there is a fire, to put it out.

When an engine fails on any aircraft with more than one engine, the sudden loss of power is amplified by the fact that the other engine is operating at full power. The aircraft wants to yaw (pivot) immediately towards the side of the failed engine. The overcompensation is a deadly tendency, especially right after takeoff when your aircraft is at its heaviest and the other operating engine is at full power. It is counterintuitive, but in some aircraft it's necessary to pull back the power on the operating engine to overcome yaw, if it's severe, while you are trimming the airplane to compensate for the new line of thrust.

You'd think it would be obvious to determine immediately which engine failed, but it's hard to maintain directional control right after engine failure, and it might take a moment to figure out which engine quit working. Pilots are trained to remember that the dead foot (not holding down the rudder) determines the dead engine, and depending on what type of aircraft, the effect can be mild to extreme. Everyone thinks a twin engine aircraft is safer than a single engine, but with an engine failure at takeoff in a light twin engine, having a second engine often means you plow into the farmer's field a little farther away and at a much faster speed.

The well-publicized video of the TransAsia crash in Taiwan sums it up. They had an engine fail right after takeoff, which shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but in the ensuing chaos, they accidentally shut down the operating engine. The question in the media was how a pilot could shut down the wrong engine. The answer is: easily, and every multiengine pilot knows it could happen, so we all train for it.

When the engine failed, it wasn't the dead engine that was their primary concern, it was the good engine operating at full takeoff power that was trying to yaw and turn them into the dead engine. Subliminally, in the moment of mechanical pandemonium, they pulled back the power on the good engine so, for a few moments, they were moving straight ahead and had control. That moment of Zen led them to believe they were shutting down the correct engine. In this case, they shouldn't have done anything except fly the airplane, come back around, and land where they just took off.

All the engines of my life were running at full throttle and I forgot how hard the yaw would be when one failed. I'd repeatedly trained for engine failure, but when it happened, I forgot to put my foot down hard on the other rudder to regain my directional control. I just let the operating engine yaw into the dead engine and plow me deep into the earth.

Brad never did say a word about hitting me. Life went on, but I felt betrayed. Considering everyone I'd ever known in my life, I had never had a violation of trust like what happened that night. In the big scheme of events in the world, this was nothing, but I never for one moment thought he would ever hit me and treat me with such disregard. I assumed there was an unspoken contract between partners that no matter how mad you are, you still don't hit someone, especially eight days after that someone gave birth to your daughter. He was my best friend and ally, and having him strike me was completely out of the realm of possibilities. When it happened, I could do nothing but try and justify it.

In that moment of impact, Brad became something else in a blink of an eye. It not only changed me and how I viewed him, but it changed him and opened up a strength and avenue of dominance he didn't realize he had. After that day, all he had to do was make a quick motion like he was going to hit me, and I'd flinch and shutdown. I couldn't stand the thought of him even having the idea that he was allowed to hit me. I didn't care about the physical pain, which was temporary and minor; I was worried about being able to love someone who might hit me in the future.

What I learned to do in situations where I couldn't accept what was happening to me was to tell myself how much worse other people had it. I justified it. It's a very woman thing to do. I didn't actually know anybody who'd been hit by her husband, so I told myself that millions of women must be in situations much worse than this. I figured the scenario of
Sleeping with the Enemy
must happen all the time and none of us know it. I had a nice house, healthy child, and food in the fridge. Just live with it. If I couldn't find resolution with that, I'd take it to a multi-national and cultural scale (must be all those years of my mom telling me I was ungrateful for not eating my dinner. “Just think about all those poor, starving children in Africa who would love to be sitting where you are.” Oh, the guilt!). That way, I could remind myself of those poor women in Iraq, Iran, and India who would trade places with me in a heartbeat. And it's true. The problem with that was I lived in
this
here and now and when I look back, I realize how I began to change after that first strike. I was ashamed of myself for making the wrong choices, and it began a cycle of destructive self-talk that eroded who I thought I was.

I don't know who changed more—him or me.

He never apologized for hitting me, but what he did do was suddenly start helping out with chores. Even when I was working full time I still did most of the household chores, but all of a sudden he was pitching in without me even asking. He did some laundry, and he even brought home takeout one night, which he had never done before. I never knew the simple relief of not having to cook a meal could be so uplifting. He remembered to call when he was running late, and thanked me for making dinner. All those little things you should do anyway, he started doing with an obsession. We'd sit down every night and without looking at me, he'd say, “Thank you for making dinner.”

He became a trained robot and, out of duty, said all the things he was supposed to say, and we both pretended nothing happened. He was kind and sweet that following week, and it was possible to convince myself that it was a momentary lapse of reason and that he was showing how sorry he was by overcompensating in daily kindness.

It lulled me into a sense of security because I truly felt he was sorry for what he'd done, even though he didn't say it. I tucked the incident into the back of my brain as an unfortunate moment and shame on me for even thinking that one incident should change or redefine our relationship. Even though he hit me, he was acting like such a good husband. Maybe it was worth taking a hit if we could have such a nice relationship.

Lindsey was eight weeks old and crew scheduling reminded me it was time to go back to work. There were still several company pilots on layoff, so I was able to convince the chief pilot and crew scheduling to call a furloughed pilot back to work and extend my maternity leave for another month. They made sure I understood it was just one more month. It was unpaid leave, but I was so deeply in love with my new baby that the thought of leaving her for even a few minutes sent chills down my spine and acid into my stomach. How was I ever going to go back to work? My entire body ached at the thought of being away from her for more than a few hours.

I had to push the doubts aside because I had made a deal with Brad and our baby. I chanted the mantra over and over that a lot of women work full-time and their children are fine...right? Lindsey would have the luxury bonus of a stay at home parent—it just wouldn't be me. She would get to stay in this glorious mountain home and not have to spend a moment in daycare.

Problem was, ever since Lindsey had been born, Brad was tentative around her. At the first whimper or squirm, he would hand her over, but it was because I was there. I figured if I wasn't there, he'd have to step up and learn how to fix a baby. He was a mechanic. He knew how to troubleshoot a problem. It's easy, just follow the checklist. Even though Brad had not spent any significant time alone with Lindsey, I knew if I could do it, so could he. He was excited about being a stay-at-home dad, and how hard could it be to fix a fifteen pound human?

Brad turned in his notice at work and joyfully burned his mechanic's uniform. He had already used his paternity leave (unpaid time off, but you are allowed to use your sick and vacation time up) to build a greenhouse, and he was looking forward to staying home and tackling more projects.

I was jealous that he was going to get to be the stay-at-home parent, but I knew in my heart that we needed to be financially durable, so I was going to willingly make the sacrifice to keep our family structure strong. I put myself in this new mindset, focused on the plan, and made my checklist—never once thinking I would need to deviate from it.

Since I had not flown for four months, I had to go back to Minneapolis for recurrent training before I could go back to work. I was already having anxiety dreams that I showed up at the airplane and had no idea what I was doing. The nightmare would begin as I got off the crew bus and realized that I had forgotten my uniform and clothes for my week-long trip. As I crawled into the cockpit in my shorts and t-shirt, I'd get the airplane started, and during the takeoff roll I'd realize I didn't know what to do next. It was at that moment in my dream that the terror of completely forgetting how to fly would set in, but I was too embarrassed to tell the other crew members that I didn't know what to do, and I'd wake up drenched in sweat and my heart in my throat. I always knew what to do in real life, so my brain knew how to create the perfect nightmare.

The first step of going back to work was in motion and I was leaving my baby for the first time. I cried all the way to the airport. I cried the entire night before, during the flight, and the entire first night in the hotel. I was determined to breast feed for a full year, so I pumped every two hours to keep the milk supply going. I was narcoleptic tired trying to prepare for my upcoming simulator training, but I'd been informed by the chief pilot that I would not be returning as captain, that I'd been demoted to first officer. That was my punishment for having a baby. They really didn't give me a reason; I was simply instructed to prepare for recurrent training as a first officer. I was completely pissed off, but figured it was only temporary and was politics as usual. They were going to use me as a way of deterring the other women who had entered our pilot herd to stay away from the mommy track. It took the burden off of me to study for the captain's check ride, so the feeling of “fuck you” was mutual. I was still a junior captain and low on the seniority list, so I figured I might have to bounce between first officer and captain for a few months.

Four days. That's how long it took for an entire life's worth of planning to come unglued. On my fourth day of training, I was slammed. I was informed that I was suddenly expected to pass the captain's check ride or be passed over permanently for a captain's slot in Denver. They made sure I knew that I would not have a captain's bidding schedule, but I was expected to pass the captain check ride. I couldn't say no. I was already flying as captain, but shit, I really hadn't studied to that level, and I hadn't flown for four months. I was rusty, disconnected, and I was missing my child to the point of dysfunction.

I spent the entire day locked in my hotel room trying to review everything there was to know about aviation—which seemed like a lifetime of knowledge. I usually liked to unwind before my simulator sessions, but I had a 10:00 p.m. captain's oral and simulator check ride I had to pass, so I studied straight through dinner.

At 9:10 p.m., the phone rang. It was Brad.

He didn't get past “Hi” before I interrupted him. “Hey, Brad, I'm in a huge hurry. I found out I am being given a captain's check ride and the van is picking me up in twenty minutes to go to the simulator,” but before I finished my thoughts, I took a sharp intake of breath thinking maybe something was wrong with Lindsey and that's why he was calling.

“Wait. What's wrong? What's up? Is everything okay?” I instantly dove into panic overload.

“Yes, there
is
something wrong,” Brad stammered. “I can't do this. I just can't. It's not what I expected, and I think I'm going to hurt her...”

“Wait, what? What are you talking about? Can't do what? Is Lindsey okay?” I just couldn't piece together what he was saying. My mind was focused off in the distance, and I couldn't draw it in.

He took a deep breath and his tone changed. In a firm voice he said, “I can't be the stay-at-home dad. I just can't. It's not right. You have to come home, and we need to figure something else out. This isn't going to work for me...”

I knew the feeling of fear and self-doubt of being home alone with a newborn. It was absolutely terrifying sometimes, so I just figured he needed a boost of confidence. He was in a weak moment, and it was going to be okay. During my first full day of recurrent training in Minneapolis, I had called him on what was to be his first day alone with Lindsey, only to find out that he'd gone to his mom's house. I called Bernice's house, and found that Brad was sleeping. He spent the first two days at his mom's house with Lindsey, so he hadn't even been alone with her until this particular day.

“Oh, Brad, you're just having a bad day. I know how that goes. It'll be okay, just give it some time. You'll get used to it, and you'll learn what to do to soothe her. It just takes practice. Sometimes she just needs to cry.”

While I was saying the last few words, he was overriding me by saying, “No, no, no. NO! I have thought about this. I can't stand staying here all day listening to her cry off and on. I'm all jittery and I'm afraid I'm going to hurt her.” All I could think was that he meant he'd hurt her by mistake. That's not what he meant, and I was too dense to catch what he was truly admitting.