Escape from Paris: Mission Impossible

A long-awaited family trip ends in a return journey from hell.

I just returned from a family reunion in Paris. The trip was exhausting, fulfilling, memorable, and magical, and it was the last time I will ever be there with my mom. For that reason alone, the trip was worth it.

But our return journey…… it was as if I was being punished for daring to do something special for once.

The context is this: my mother is a lifelong Francophile. She majored in French poetry in college and taught substitute French in Los Angeles public high schools before having kids. (Can you imagine that they actually used to teach French in public schools—in Los Angeles!?)

In her late 40s, divorced and single, she sent her second child off to college and moved to Paris with her youngest. She successfully rented an apartment, enrolled my sister in school, and shipped her belongings, her furniture, her car, and our dog to France.

Meanwhile, I had just graduated from college with vague future plans. My only actual plan was a sketchy summer internship at Interview Magazine in M…