It’s 2008. I’m in O'Hare (Chicago airport) around Christmas time, absolutely tired from a 36+ hours of travel from Lithuania. My flight to North Dakota has just been cancelled by a region-wide snowstorm. My cell phone and credit cards aren’t working because I haven’t called to have them turned back on/authorized for the US. I’m so tired and a little delirious, and coming down with a cold. I just want to get home and see my family. I shuffle into the line for the airline to see what can be done about my flight, but the line is long and I am already defeated. Tears leak from my eyes intermittently from tiredness, helplessness, and self pity.

A business woman in the line turns around. She introduces herself, frowning a little because this is so against whatever code she lives her life by. She explains she’s a pharmaceutical exec from New Jersey and that she is visiting some distant relative in North Dakota, and was on the same (now cancelled) flight as me. She hands me an apple and protein bar and says something like ‘I have no maternal instinct. I do not have children and I do not want them. But you are so clearly out of your depth here I feel compelled to help you in some way.’ She helps me book a room in the airport hotel and trusts I will pay her back when I get home (which I do). She pays for a meal we have together, in which she mostly talks about how she climbed the ladder at her corporate job.

The whole incident now seems like a fever dream because I truly was sleep deprived and loony. This woman emphasized many times how she was not a caretaker, she was not a warm person. Indeed she was not gregarious or solicitous. But she also very very much was deeply kind to me, much to her own surprise I think. 0 percent maternal, but my extreme patheticness really drew out something she didn’t know was in her.

I hope she has continued to have a great child-free life.