“Bye!” “We love you!”
“We miss you already!”
“I love you too,” said the 16-year-old girl, gently prying her little sisters off her legs and torso. “It’s OK. I’ll be back in a few weeks,” she laughed.
“Bye,” said her 14-year-old brother. He threw his arms around her.
“Have fun being the oldest,” she said, smiling into his hair.
“Hah. Yesss. Power!” he said. He let her go, and then suddenly grabbed her for another hug.
It was Friday afternoon, one of the busiest times in the week at Washington Dulles International Airport and ours wasn’t the only family saying goodbye — if only for a while. People kissed and waved, as people do, making little eddies and diversions in the current of travelers that poured through the portal marked “Ticketed Passengers Only.”
“Goodbye, darling,” we grown-ups said, hugging her more tightly than usual but not as tightly as we wanted to. Three weeks is a long time for a child to be gone, making her way in foreign places, even if the child is taller than you are.
“I’d better go,” she said, and there was another round of hugs.
And then — well, she went. Hefting her bags, she grinned a last farewell to her family and walked off toward the uniformed fellow standing at the gate. She looked terribly grown up.
Until that moment, in the weeks leading up to the day of her departure, it was as though she almost physically switched back and forth between the vulnerable child she had been and the confident woman she would someday become.
“I’ve packed Aristotle and Tocqueville for the flight,” she said at one point, with the brisk confidence of a mature traveling intellectual for whom aircraft hold the pleasant prospect of uninterrupted hours of inquiry (though mature traveling intellectuals probably pack mystery novels, or iPods).
The next minute she’d be worrying: “But what if I run out of euros? I have dollars, but I can’t use dollars in Brussels!”
“Darling, you simply change them.”
“But — how?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but of course revealed her inexperience. Even when teenagers seem strikingly mature, they still are, in fact, young. Why would any of them necessarily know about those little booths labeled Cambio/Exchange/Wechsel?
As she had prepared for the trip, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing — and what she ought to be packing — until abruptly she’d be at a loss and asking for help.
And suddenly, there she was behind the barrier, out of our reach, amid a crowd of strangers.
“Wow,” said one of her sisters. “There she goes.”
As the doors to the shuttle opened, just before she stepped into the vehicle that would take her across the hot tarmac to a waiting airplane, our daughter shot us a huge, happy smile.
She no longer looked like the confident woman she’d one day grow up to be. All of a sudden, she had become her.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
