I jumped out of a plane

I jumped out of a plane the other day.

I don’t normally shy away from adventures. In fact, I’ve constructed a life more or less based around the concept of saying “Yes” to any and all offers of fun. I was even proposed to with the help of my favorite Joycean passage of “Yes” – leading the witness, perhaps, but he knew it would work to great emotional effect (weeping with joy in a twilit Brooklyn Bridge park).

My daughter came to me because of my Facebook mom group. My first skydiving offer came from the same source. Melissa messaged me and said her producer friend was looking for another mom to join their filmed skydiving cast for the Try Guys. She said under no circumstances would she do it, but she knew someone who would probably say yes…me?

Yes!

I’ve always been intrigued by it, but it’s on my list of things I find too genuinely frightening to ever pursue. Skydiving and heroin are the only two items on that list. But if someone calls me out of the blue to offer me the experience and pay me to do it? That, my friends, is what they call a no-brainer. Which, incidentally, is one potential outcome of this “sport.”

Fraught with nerves the morning of, I showed my kids videos of people skydiving at breakfast and was calmed by one of a 90-year old grandmother doing it. We watched several videos of people just fully dancing in the air, choreographed balletic free-falls that now boggle my (SPOILER: still in-tact!) brain, having just experienced it.

“But I WANT TO DO IT WITH YOU!” Rowan hollered when I finally turned off YouTube.

“You can’t,” I hugged him. “Mommy has to jump from a plane by herself.”

(In the US, you must be 18 to skydive. In Germany, 12. In New Zealand, they can skydive as young as 5).

I drove to Lake Elsinore to join the rest of the cast (three other adventurous moms) and crew. One of the moms had a 3-month old at home, and as we sat there, chatting about her new C-suite job offer while she breast-pumped, I thought back to how I had kissed my kids goodbye that morning, how I had kissed Tyler, thinking maybe, possibly, this was the last time I’d ever kiss him. The odds are good! Of surviving a skydive. It’s much more risky to drive in a car. But when I told my personal-injury lawyer father about my date to skydive, he thundered “It’s my life motto not to engage in activities whose outcomes include death.” I knew this, of course. I wasn’t allowed to rollerblade as a kid, and bike-riding necessitated pads over every conceivable flesh-point. I wasn’t allowed to cross the street by myself until I was 11 years old. My parents were…nervous. And yet, they enjoyed skiing and SCUBA-diving together for years.

“I mean the kind of activity that if it goes wrong, it ends in death. Not if it goes wrong, you get injured,” my dad corrected.

I know. I had kissed Tyler goodbye grimly.  Again, and again. Just in case. He giggled, clearly enjoying the only time in our nearly 11 years together when I was more nervous about something than he was.

I got to set at noon, but we wouldn’t be taking off ‘til golden hour. Nearly 7 hours to shoot B-roll, get interviewed, take training, eat Pringles, and sweat through my shirt at the thought of never seeing my kids again.

The series I was filming is a YouTube sensation called Try Guys, which now has an offshoot called the Try Moms. They interviewed me on what it was like choosing to do this for myself, and no one else (as this isn’t exactly something I can share with my kids). I realized that being a mother is a bit like being an appointed representative. I am their Mayor Mother – I am their 311, I am their chef, I am their stylist, I am their highly-skilled yet very-unpaid laborer (unless you count kisses), but more than that, I am their voice in the House of Commons (ie. life). They have unwittingly elected me to, for several years anyhow, fight their fights for them, stand up for them, be their voice in all matters, select activities that they would like best, source funding for those activities, landscape their house to best suit their play, decorate their neighborhood (rooms) in ways that befit their personalities, be fully prepped with relevant reading materials on how best to serve them.

This, of course, on top of being the Mayor of Me and My Own Life, and my own career. But that day, out on the airfield, I was representing me, and me alone. My Yesteryear District of 1, Population: Me. It simply had nothing to do with them - a strange rarity in this new life of mine, with little kids. It’s an experience I’ve always wanted to try, but merely felt too afraid. Engaging with bugs in any way and hurtling to my death at 14,000 feet are the limits of my fear, I guess. (And heroin.)

Unless you are certified, you must tandem-jump, which means you are tightly strapped to a SkyDive Bro™, ascend to 14,000 feet in a tiny, nauseating plane ride with bench seating, and edge closer and closer to the gaping maw of a metal door as your plane-mates jump before you. I looked back at my ponytail’d SkyDive Bro™, purple goggles affixed to my no doubt-horrified looking face, and he yelled over the wind “Let’s DO this! Ready? 1…” and then, he jumped.

Each jumper had their own mid-air videographer. Before we got in the plane, she urged me to try to remember to look at her and smile on the descent but there’s zero percent chance I did that. The footage of me from this venture is going to be…how do I put this? Ballistically unalluring. Between the roaring wind and my abject terror, I don’t know how my eyes didn’t billow out of their damn trenches.

For 45 seconds, we fell through space. I somehow did not throw up despite my stomach having moved to my ear canal, my lips were curled backwards in wind-horror, and then suddenly he tugged, and we exploded upwards, and then proceeded the most stunning, peaceful 5 minutes of my life. On my eastern periphery, the sky was purple, the perfectly full, fat moon as big and round and close as I’ve ever been and will ever be to it. To my west was the sun dipping behind the mountains, casting a copper glow onto its retreat, a vast blue lake just beneath us. He showed me how to toggle the parachute straps to move us in whichever direction I pleased. We sashayed mid-air, swooping hither and thither. I gasped.

My butt and legs were shaking so hard against him I finally had to acknowledge it aloud. It was just like the uncontrollable shakes I had after they gave me the epidural in the hospital. My legs clanged against each other in the hospital bed for 20 minutes as I watched them, unable to stop. It was the strangest sensation, feeling no chill and yet having a prolonged lower-body seizure in response to the shot.

“I can’t stop shaking,” I said quietly - we could hear each other now, we could even whisper to each other.

“It’s okay. It’s normal!” he laughed, as my butt involuntarily clenched and released, clenched and released against his stomach.

I looked around again, forced myself to take deep breaths. I could see, I suppose, why some select few people dedicate their entire lives to this feeling. Before our flight, I had asked: my SkyDive Bro™ and his friends jump out of planes 8-12 times a day. Every waking hour, tempting fate, gravity, the durability of textiles! Life! It’s the ultimate risk, with the ultimate view. Hanging there, swaying on the literal breeze, as the moon opens its big face to you, glowing and grinning.

“I feel like an astronaut,” I marveled. Every day, on the hour, thousands of tattooed, colorful little Buzz Aldrins populate the sky, falling and floating for a feeling.

When we landed on the ground, safely, quickly, on our feet even (!), with no bones broken or organs smashed, I found my fellow cast members and we hugged. “You’re the only one who screamed as they jumped out of the plane,” the DP pointed out.

Really?!

“It was…loud,” the producer laughed.

While we were gathering our belongings to go home, Joey, the mom of the newborn, shrieked and showed us a video her husband had just sent of their 3 month-old, who had laughed for the first time when we were up there, hurtling through space. Her tiny little laugh reaching towards the distant, echoing sound of her mom’s laughter in the sky, maybe. Or away from my screams.

The skydiving episode will be released on Mother’s Day.