Taking my sixty-year-old mother on her first flight

My mother had never been on a plane before she turned sixty.

Not for lack of money. Her daughter could afford the ticket. She wouldn't go. Trains were better, you could watch the countryside go by. Planes were so expensive, that money could buy your father a coat. Planes were frightening, and what if — her what-ifs always trailed off into a long ellipsis.

Last autumn I stopped negotiating. I dropped two tickets to Sanya into the family group chat. "Mum, Dad, the itinerary's set. Send me your ID numbers. On the day we leave, whoever doesn't come, I tear up the tickets." My mother was silent in the group for ten minutes. Then she wrote: "You child. As bossy as your father was when he was young." Then she asked him privately which suitcase was suitable to take on a plane.

On the day we flew I got to the airport three hours early to walk her through the formalities. Her first time through security, she emptied her pockets onto the tray and apologized to the officer several times over. Her first time boarding, she gripped the handrail on the stairs, and I said, Mum, hold my hand. Her first takeoff, she squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt, eyes shut, repeating that it was fine, it was fine — and then, in the middle of repeating it, she stopped.

She opened her eyes and looked out the window.

The moment the plane broke through the cloud layer, I saw my sixty-year-old mother press her face against the window. Outside was a sea of cloud running to the horizon, lit gold by the sun. She looked for a long, long time. Then she turned her head and said something I have never forgotten.

"So that's what's above the clouds."

I said, "Mum, that's what I thought the first time I flew too."

The trip was seven days. We stayed a week by the sea. My mother learned to work the breakfast machine in the hotel, learned to bury her feet in the sand, learned to chat with strangers at the edge of the pool. The warmth she had built up over decades as her neighborhood's building representative worked just as well out of province. My father took photographs beside her, more than two thousand of them. His great late-life hobby is photographing her. "She looks better when she smiles than she did when she was young."

On the flight home she talked to me for a while. All her life, she said, she had assumed that the good things had nothing to do with her. Planes were for fathers on business trips. Travel was for families with money. "I just cook, keep the house, look after the lot of you." She said, "If you hadn't forced it, I might have gone my whole life without knowing that's what it's like above the clouds."

We assume the best love we can give our parents is to come home often. There is a more direct kind: without asking permission, take them out of that circle of "I don't deserve this."

After we got back, she changed. She started planning her own trips. She went to Yunnan with my father. She went to Guilin with her old girlfriends. Last year she organized an old sisters' tour group and made herself the leader, with itineraries more detailed than a travel agency's. Her phone is full of photographs, and every single first time gets posted to Moments with the same plain caption: "Sixty. First time."

This year her goal is a cruise. She has already done the research, and she is working on the group: "We've had hard lives for half of them. For the rest, one first time a year. That's not too much to ask, is it?"

It isn't. Mum, it isn't even close. Every year's first time from now on, your daughter is buying the ticket.