Posted by “I hate airports.”
That’s what I wrote on a blog entry back in 2011. The reason for that feeling is not because of the long lines and wait times due to the airport security that can impinge on our personal space. Of course that does not help. But for me it is more than the inconveniences we experience when we go through an airport.
It is true that airport provides portals to different destinations and places. It may be the gateway to a dream that awaits us in some other parts of the world. Or it may provide a passage to an exotic vacation spot. Yet airports to me has a different connotation.
Airports to me is a place where loved ones are taken away from their family. It is a place of separation. A place of painful goodbyes.
I can still remember when I left for the first time for the US in 1993, leaving my family and friends. The feeling was so gut-wrenching, especially with my virtually unknown day of return. Yes, I may be partly excited to see the other side of the world, but leaving my known world and people whom I love was not easy at all.
I know I shared these sentiments with millions of migrants, overseas contract workers (OCW) and their families. The feeling of utter loneliness of an OCW when he sits on the airport, waiting to board his plane, while the family that he left behind weeps, is beyond what I can describe.
Somehow as years passed and I got used to living away from my relatives and my homeland, the Philippines, that the bad sentiments I have for airports have mellowed. Until recently.
I have already told you that my wife and I went back to the Philippines last month after 8 years of not going home. On our return flight to the US, we told our relatives in the Philippines that we would just take the Grab taxi (the Uber version in the Philippines) instead of them dropping us off in the airport terminal. This avoids those painful goodbyes at the airport that I am still not comfortable with.
Upon our return, we did not feel the pangs of homesickness leaving the Philippines that much as a day after we arrived back here in the US, my daughter who now lives and works in Florida, came home to Iowa and spent a week and a half with us. My son, who is in college, was also home for the summer break. So for about a week and a half, both of my kids were home and my family was again under one roof. Instead of being empty-nesters, we had a full house. But most of all, my heart was full.
Then of course like everything else, those days ended, and we had to bring my daughter to the airport for her flight back to Florida. And that’s when that awful feeling I have for airports was rekindled.
Her flight was at 6 AM, so we were in the airport before the sun was up. I know we’ll see her again in several months, but it still was not easy. After the short goodbye embrace, I followed her with my gaze until she disappeared into the bowels of the terminal’s security area.
In a moment, my daughter was gone. Taken away from me by the airport.
We did not go home straight as we know it would be a little lonely there again. My wife and I went to a nearby park here in Des Moines where we had a short devotional and said a little prayer for our daughter. We waited for the dawn to break into morning. As the sun appeared and spread its rays into the horizon, somehow it gleamed some joy to our forlorn hearts.
(*photo taken at Gray’s Lake in downtown Des Moines)