There’s An Emotional Reason Why Giving Someone A Ride To An Airport Feels So Weirdly Intimate
It's never just a ride to the airport.
Michael T | Unsplash I often think about a standup comedy bit I saw years ago that didn’t make me laugh. The comic was teasing a friend who had asked her for a ride to the airport.
She said something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing here): “If you’re in your 40s and you’re still asking for rides to the airport, you have to seriously rethink your life choices.”
Essentially, the comic was saying that success in midlife means having enough money that you never have to ask for help.
I find this depressing and oh-so-American. But it’s true — asking for help feels hard, and even more so as we get older and more entrenched in our parallel lives. I hate putting people on the spot, interrupting their busy schedules, worrying if they are keeping score.
That's why giving someone a ride to the airport feels so weirdly intimate.
Gustavo Fring / Pexels
I know I’m not the only person who sometimes does things or pays for things that I don’t necessarily need to do or pay for, simply because I can’t summon the will or energy to reach out and make a request. It’s better, almost, to have to ask. Back when I was supporting my family on one nonprofit income, I lived a more interdependent life.
Friends and neighbors helped us build a patio, dig a French drain, paint a kitchen, and yes, give us rides to and from the airport.
Now, as a single mom with two kids on various sports teams, I often have to coordinate carpools simply because I haven’t yet figured out how to be physically present in two distinct geographic locations at one time.
Parents with spouses, I’ve found, are generally not coordinating carpools. This, even though carpools often logistically make sense. Not only that, they would take some burden off of them, release fewer fumes into the environment, and be more fun for the kids.
Instead, after each sports practice, there is the Great Migration of separate cars traveling from separate houses to pick up separate kids. More work, more gas, less fun.
Let’s talk about that last bit — the fun bit — for a minute, because we don’t intuitively associate help with fun.
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And yet, offering and receiving help nearly always makes for a more memorable experience. Building our backyard patio, for instance, was a grueling, sweaty job, but it also involved music and beer, and human connection.
A friend of my husband’s, who had just recently moved to Portland and was grieving the unexpected death of a loved one, dedicated multiple sequential weekends to the job and always stayed for dinner. Had we hired someone, I would have undoubtedly enjoyed a more level patio over the last decade, but I wouldn’t have the memories.
When I recently picked up a friend at the airport, I got to talk to her the whole ride home — it wasn’t a favor so much as it was an opportunity for connection.
And by the way, my friend didn’t ask for a ride from the airport. Like me, she feels self-conscious. But I offered because the flip side of having to ask for help is finding more joy in offering it.
I get giddy, almost, when I see an opportunity to offer help, or when someone reaches out and I can say yes. Not because I’m keeping score, necessarily (okay, a little), but because I know how much other people’s help means to me, and it makes me feel good to be on the giving end now and then. (When the help involves driving around prepubescent boys, it also helps us expand our repertoire of fart and armpit jokes._
I find it sad, the shame so many of us feel around being the one to have to ask. It’s hard, too, when so few of us are part of well-defined communities in which the members simply feel a natural sense of obligation toward one another. When I dipped my toes in the waters of organized religion years ago, it had very little to do with God and quite a lot to do with being part of a group that actively practices mutual aid..
More importantly, doing things for and with people makes for a more enriching life.
Can we all, regardless of our age, income, or marital status, challenge ourselves to be more intentional about asking for help? Graciously receiving help? Offering help? Graciously giving help? There is no shame in it, only opportunity.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
