Abandoned at the Airport

So now you know that I was already traumatized from being left in the UK.

I got on the plane to head back home to LAX and I was drained of both energy and money. I did sit next to an older British woman who introduced me to the delight that is Dramboie in tea, so the flight was a win in my book.

I landed at LAX and walked out to baggage claim where I was expecting to find my family. You see, if you had normal parents, or even not my parents then they would be there. They would apologize for abandoning you in the UK, when they knew months before they would not be able to make it. Those types of things.

But because this is me and my family. No one was there. Nope. No one.

So I gathered all my bags including the ones that carried the gifts that I was told I must return home with, since you know they sent me to the UK and all.

Still no parents. This was before cell phones, so I used the airport house phone to see if a message had been left for me. Nope.

So I went to the street outside baggage claim to wait for them to arrive.

I waited 2 hours. That's right, two hours after getting off an international flight and getting abandoned without any money in the UK.

So I called the friend I had met in the UK to see if she could come get me. At this point it was the middle of the night so I woke her from a deep sleep. I don't think I was very clear because she mumbled at me and hung up. (To this day she still feels guilty, which shows what an amazing person she is. I mean who feels guilty that they didn't realize that my shitty parents had abandoned me at the airport.)

So I called my friend, Andrea, and she came running to my rescue. It took her a while to get to the airport since she lived in a distant part of LA, but she came as fast as she could.

As Andrea and her brother arrived 45 minutes later, my parents drove up.

This is probably 4 hours after my flight had landed.

The kicker is that they didn't even apologize. My mother said, "We were seeing Dancing with Wolves, it was longer than we expected, but we weren't going to walk out of a movie." (This is in quotes because I still remember this sentence. It is probably the sentence that most clearly sums up what a catastrophically bad parent this woman was.)

When you live with crazy, it becomes normal. Terrible parents are able to justify their terrible behavior in a way that makes the kid accept it. They don't have to like it or agree with it, but the child will accept it.

We drove off to the new house they were living in since they moved every year of my life except for the 5 years I was in high school through my first year in college.

They didn't ask me about the flight or my trip instead they talked about the movie they had just seen. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up I was asked to give them the gifts I had brought.

This is the point in my life where I finally realized that these were crazy people who should be avoided at all cost. It took me a while to get away from them for good, but this was my start.

I met my now husband of many years soon after this incident and my daughter recently pointed out to me that all of my stories that are about good things in my life begin after I met him and this is because he is amazing, but also because I had finally had enough crazy and I was now old enough to take more control over my life.