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Last year at Christmas on a flight from Tampa to Raleigh, I was sitting next to a 16-year-old, a serious-looking girl with her head down, book in lap, pencil in hand. She was studying for the SAT and on her way to spend the holiday with her father, who lived in Raleigh with his second wife and baby.
The girl didn't seem to want to talk about it any further. She didn't look particularly happy about the trip, either. I thought about her, feeling out of place with a family she hardly knew. I thought about her mother in Tampa, having Christmas without her daughter.
On the flight back to Tampa, two young people, a 19-year-old man and a woman of 22 sat next to me. They weren't traveling together; they had met on the flight. But they were very compatible and talked the whole time.
The young man was visiting his girlfriend in Tampa. The young woman was going home. The teen was saying that his girlfriend's mother liked him. What about her father, the woman asked.
He'd never met him, the teen said.
"My girlfriend's parents are divorced," he said.
"So are mine," the woman said.
"So are mine," the teen said.
At the airport, as the rest of the passengers rushed to get on the monorail to the terminal, the two just stood there next to each other as if they were waiting for someone who would never come.
They were really nice kids. The teen had dropped out of school. So had the woman, but she had gone back and finished.
This Christmas I will be in Tampa for the first time in three years and for the first time in I don't know how many years, I won't be spending it with my daughter. She lives in New York now, where her father lives and her sisters from his previous marriage and a number of cousins. She's an adult, so she can spend Christmas wherever she wants. She didn't have that choice as a child. Christmas vacation meant flying - alone - to her dad's and back home after the New Year.
A lot of kids make that trip.
If the kids and both divorced parents live in the same city, they're luckier, at least geographically. But proximity can breed animosity, also, and the kids are more likely to get pulled this way and that way daily, all through the whole jolly season.
Whatever way you cut it, this holiday season is difficult for fractured families. Someone gets left out. Maybe it's the morning of Christmas Day when your child first discovers the miracle of Santa's gifts under the tree; maybe it's your traditional candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Maybe it's this whole holiday season - and you get the kids in 2004. Or maybe it's the holiday season every year, all the way through from Hanukkah to New Year's Day, because the kids live with you and fly to their dad's, or mom's, the first day of winter vacation.
At this time of year, the fantasy of Norman Rockwell families is pitched everywhere: mom, dad, kids and the golden retriever all living together under one Spanish tile roof, all of them sitting down to Christmas dinner with a smiling grandma and grandpa and a roast turkey and spiral ham and holiday-themed place settings for 12.
The message to rest of us is: You failed to produce this scene.
Families aren't what they used to be, and some of that is good.
Holiday tradition no longer follows any rules; it's all your own now.
As for you divorced parents, make a New Year's resolution and start keeping it today: Try to get along with your ex. It doesn't matter what he or she did to you. Your kids are more important.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.