Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [28]
“For me, absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” Lorrie says. She stopped working at PSA a long time ago, and has spent most of her energy since then as an at-home mom. She would love to have a husband who comes home every evening. “We could have a glass of wine, eat dinner together, chat about our day,” she says. “And I don’t even need the wine or the meal. I just want the husband in the room with me.” She and I have nice phone conversations when I’m on the road. “It’s not the same as having you here,” she tells me.
In some ways, it was worse when the kids were younger, because back then Lorrie wanted my hands-on help. For a while we had two in diapers and in car seats, and she felt overwhelmed when I left on a long trip. Sometimes, she’d be in tears as we said our good-byes. In her PSA days, she had once gotten to sit in a flight simulator. “I know the flap settings,” she’d tell me. “I’ll get the plane off the ground. You stay home with two crying babies for four days.” She was joking, but…
Now that the kids are older, she says that when I return home after a four- or five-day absence, my reentry to family life isn’t always smooth. I’m jet-lagged, I’m out of the loop of family activities. I’ve missed a lot. Lorrie says it sometimes takes me a day and a half before I can give something back to the relationship. I’m in the house, but I’m not able to jump back into our normal routine with the same vigor. Sometimes I’m just feeling spent, and not eager to attend to household chores.
I do see myself at times as somewhat of an outsider in my own family. But I love that the girls connect so well with Lorrie, and I understand why my bonds with them are not as effortless. I get it: I’m more formal, I’m male, I’m older, I’m gone a lot.
Parents build up a bank account of interactions and memories with their children. Lorrie has had a lot more moments with the kids than I have, so her bank balance with the girls is higher than mine. Certainly, there’s a lot of love between me and the girls, but I know I have handicaps that I have to work to overcome.
My time away is a challenge. But Lorrie and I have been through great challenges together, and we have spent twenty years working through them. We work hard to find the right balance. We have both learned a lot about ourselves and each other and about what it takes to make a relationship work and to make it rewarding. We have both grown. By working on this together for each other and for our girls, we have become better people. We have invested in ourselves.
HOW DID my personal life, apart from my aviation experiences, prepare me for that journey to the Hudson? I think that these challenges Lorrie and I faced together made me better able to accept the cards I’ve been dealt—and to play them with all the resources at my disposal. Early in our marriage, Lorrie and I were dealt the challenge of infertility.
A year or so after we got married, Lorrie and I began planning to have a family. We spent a year trying to conceive, without success, and then went to a fertility specialist. For six months, Lorrie took Clomid to induce ovulation. Like many women on that drug, she gained weight, and that was troubling for her. She’d been in good shape before starting on the medication, and here, for reasons beyond her control, she just kept getting heavier. She put on thirty-five pounds.
One day she and I were in the car and she turned to me and said, “You never make a comment about how I look or about my weight.” My reply came naturally to me—I just said what I felt—but it meant a lot to Lorrie. I told her: “You don’t get it, do you? I love you for what’s on the inside.”
“That’s what every woman wants to hear,” she said, and she meant it.
Sometimes I get things right.
We kept trying to conceive, but I was off on trips a lot, which