Act Two. In The Event Of An Emergency, Put Your Sister In An Upright Position.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/175/babysitting?act=2

Ira GlassJon Langford of The Waco Brothers and the Mekons, with John Rice on mandolin, in a song recorded for our show. Whatever we are paying them, it is not enough. And this brings us to Act Two.

Act Two, In the Event of an Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position. On the day after Christmas all across America, divorced kids shuttle from one parent to the other. If they fly, the babysitters are the airlines themselves. This is babysitting encased in corporate procedure and corporate language. Kids flying without adults are called unaccompanied minors. Little ones get brightly colored tags pinned to their coats or hung from their necks. When you see them, it's hard not to feel bad for them and wonder what they're going to say about the experience someday when they grow up.

Back in December of 1988, on December 26th, divorced kids from all over the country got snowed in at O'Hare Airport here in Chicago. Susan Burton was one of those kids, now old enough to tell the tale. She and her sister Betsy were traveling from Colorado where their mom lived to Michigan, where they had grown up and where their dad lived. Here's Susan.

Susan BurtonThere were two types of unaccompanied minors on flights out of Denver, divorce kids and skier kids. You could spot the skier kids because they always wore something to prove they'd been to Colorado. They had lift tickets fanning out from the zippers of their jackets, or baseball caps that said, Vail. But since today was December 26, we suspected that even the boy with a raccoon face tan, the kind you get from ski goggles, was like us. A divorce kid, too. As soon as our flight left Denver, my thoughts turned to our layover in Chicago. Betsy and I loved the O'Hare Airport with its shiny food court and chain bookstores and big glass atrium ceiling, it seemed like a beautiful new mall.

When we landed in Chicago, it was snowing, snowing hard enough to shut the airport down. It was only the middle of the afternoon and travelers were already reserving sleeping spaces by throwing their parkas over blocks of chairs. Even floor space was scarce, and some people were stuck alongside the moving walkway. The mall had become a refugee camp. The departure boards showed that our fight to Grand Rapids was cancelled, so we went to a service desk where an agent took our tickets and typed things into her terminal. Then she turned on her microphone and sent a cryptic message out over the PA. "I have two UMs at the service desk, two UMs at the service desk." OK, the woman told us. Someone's coming by for you.

A second woman appeared and we followed her to a gray, unmarked door. She fumbled with her keys. I squeezed Betsy's hand. The door opened into a room packed with kids sitting on their winter jackets. There were dozens of kids, all kinds of kids, some in small groups. The young ones conversing with stuffed animals, others looking uncomfortable in dresses, or overheated in moon boots that had been too big to pack. Most of them were facing a podium at the front of the room as if they'd been dropped off at the public library and were waiting for a reading by Shel Silverstein. At the podium, a steward put our names on a list. The

woman standing next to him was wearing the uniform of another airline. It was strange to see people from different airlines mixing, almost like something that shouldn't be allowed.

There were a handful of folding chairs in the room, and we found a free one near the center. I took the seat and Betsy settled on the floor beside me. She got her baby blanket out of her bag and began to sniff it. It seemed we'd never been around so many divorced kids at once. Back home, most kids had both parents. You'd forget you were different and then you'd be at someone's house after school and the dad would come home, and from the landing on the staircase, you'd see him sorting through the mail, talking to the mother in the kitchen. It was hard to explain why this was sad. As a result, all that most of our friends knew about our divorce was that my favorite video to rent was Kramer vs. Kramer and Betsy's was the Parent Trap.

So now it was strange to hear kids talking about the things we kept to ourselves. A group nearby was engaged in a kind of divorced-kid one-upmanship. A girl wearing a sweatshirt with a Christmas tree patch said she saw her father only a couple times a year. A boy lying on his stomach claimed that he saw his dad even less. They exchanged a series of anecdotes about stepmothers, and took a poll of who had been the object of a custody battle. It seemed improper to talk so freely about these things. I had no way of expressing this at the time, but it felt like we were part of something on a grand scale. All these kids here in Chicago, at the transfer point between mom and dad.

Being babysat by the airlines was a lot like what you'd expect. Gate agents darted in and out, consulting papers and making shushing noises and yelling out names from the podium. They seemed flustered, annoyed. Normally, their babysitting duties were small scale. They were good at shepherding kids along moving walkways and doling out little pins shaped like wings. In the UM room, they reverted to the same crowd control techniques that they used in-flight. Secure the doors, withhold information, and discourage people from getting up to use the bathroom. So we did what any group of fed-up, delayed passengers does. We started to generate our own information.

In the late evening, a rumor filtered through the crowd that the reason some kids were being escorted away was that their parents were making a bigger fuss than the other parents. Where were those kids going? The question arose from those of us in the landlocked middle and traveled to the crowd. The answer was transmitted back to us by our intelligence forces stationed at the podium. Those kids got hotels. The rest of us would have to sleep here in the UM room. A divorced kid reacts to his parents' separation in one of two ways. As the rumor about the sleeping arrangements spread, it became clear who was the divorced kid who avoided conflict and who was the divorced kid who acted out. Fart noises increased. Crushed drink boxes began to litter the floor. I realize that, when thrown with sufficient force, a Nerf ball could cause injury.

Soon, word came around that the system had changed, that our babysitters were mad and they didn't care who your parents were or how many times they called. Now they were taking the good kids first. Immediately, Betsy lay down on her blanket. I took out the book in my bag, Catcher in the Rye. Within an hour, we were out of there. By now, it was one in the morning. Betsy and I and a group of others followed a stewardess through the dim halls. The metal gates were down over the entrance to the food court, and travelers were sleeping in chairs.

We would share a room with two other people. The first was a girl close to my age who was wearing glasses with pink plastic frames. I convinced myself that she was the same girl who had been on my lane at swim camp years earlier when my parents were still married. I didn't ask her because I didn't want to ruin it if it wasn't true. The second person was a stewardess who looked about 30. She wore a lot of makeup and she was big-boned, packed into her uniform. She wasn't mean to us, but she was pretty standoffish.

We settled into our room. When the stewardess went into the bathroom, the swim camp girl pulled me over to the window. The curtains were closed, but red lights shown in from the parking lot. Will you sleep in the bed with me so I won't have to sleep with the stewardess, she said. I looked over at Betsy. She was sitting on one of the two double beds in the room, sniffing her blanket. I told the girl, yes. It just came out.

Almost immediately, I felt awful. When we lay down, I inched as far to the edge as I could so that I'd feel nearer to my sister on the edge of the bed, across the aisle. The stewardess came out of the bathroom wearing control-top stockings and a lacy slip and got under the covers like that. I'd never seen a grown woman sleep in anything other than a flannel nightgown. I wondered if she always slept like that or if it was just because she had to get up early. Maybe this was what all stewardesses wore under their uniform. But maybe she just felt awkward, or maybe there were rules about what you wore, that you had to keep covered. Or maybe she just didn't want her bare legs near Betsy.

I saw Betsy shift under the covers and curl into a ball. I now felt certain that this was the worst thing I'd ever done to my sister. I wanted the strangers removed and my family restored. I hated the swim camp girl sleeping next to me. She wasn't from Michigan, she didn't have anything to do with my life. On these trips to visit our father, more than any other time, all Betsy and I had was each other. I thought of the kids in the UM room at the airport, the ones saying crass things about the saddest thing that had ever happened in life, and how reassuring it had been when I looked at Betsy, sniffing her blanket the way she always had, the way I thought she would forever.

Ira GlassSusan Burton. Since the story was first broadcast on our show, a movie based on Susan's story, kids of divorce trapped in an airport over Christmas, was released in 2006. It was a kids' comedy called Unaccompanied Minors.