“Sully is a man of few words,” Lorrie tells her friends. “So I tell him to save up his words for date night.”
LORRIE SAYS that part of what makes me a good pilot is my attention to detail. She has told me: “Sully, you expect a lot from yourself and those around you. You’re in control. That helps you as a pilot. But those aren’t always good husband qualities. Sometimes I need a companion who is more forgiving and less of a perfectionist.”
I know I can be exasperating to Lorrie. “Sully,” she has said more than once, “life is not a checklist!”
I understand her frustration, but I don’t see myself that way. I’m organized. I’m not a robot.
She says that when we go on vacation, I choreograph things with military precision, from loading the trunk to the time of departure. “That makes sense if you’re flying a hundred fifty passengers to some vacation destination,” she tells me. “But if you’re just packing our suitcases into the car for a family getaway, it’s not necessary.”
My response to her: “That’s confirmation bias. You find things that confirm your point of view, and you ignore evidence to the contrary.”
In my heart, of course, I know she has a valid point.
In some important ways, my profession as a pilot is easier for me than relationships are. I can control an airplane and make it do what I want it to do. I can learn all of its component systems and understand how they work in every circumstance. Piloting is well defined, with a process that is predictable and understandable to me. Relationships, on the other hand, are more ambiguous. There’s a good deal of nuance, and it’s not always obvious what the right answer is.
In the twenty years of our marriage, we’ve had our share of bumps in the road. At certain points, one of us would be working harder at the relationship than the other, and then it would flip-flop. We weren’t always equally committed to addressing issues. That has been an impediment at times.
Lorrie describes herself as “the voice raiser, the emotional one.” I’m easily frustrated, often tired from traveling. And the fact that I’m always packing up to leave doesn’t help. Marriage counselors advise couples not to go to bed angry. It’s also not a good idea to fly across the country angry, leaving an unhappy spouse at home.
“For me, absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” Lorrie says. She stopped working at PSA a long time ago, and has spent most of her energy since then as an at-home mom. She would love to have a husband who comes home every evening. “We could have a glass of wine, eat dinner together, chat about our day,” she says. “And I don’t even need the wine or the meal. I just want the husband in the room with me.” She and I have nice phone conversations when I’m on the road. “It’s not the same as having you here,” she tells me.
In some ways, it was worse when the kids were younger, because back then Lorrie wanted my hands-on help. For a while we had two in diapers and in car seats, and she felt overwhelmed when I left on a long trip. Sometimes, she’d be in tears as we said our good-byes. In her PSA days, she had once gotten to sit in a flight simulator. “I know the flap settings,” she’d tell me. “I’ll get the plane off the ground. You stay home with two crying babies for four days.” She was joking, but . . .
Now that the kids are older, she says that when I return home after a four- or five-day absence, my reentry to family life isn’t always smooth. I’m jet-lagged, I’m out of the loop of family activities. I’ve missed a lot. Lorrie says it sometimes takes me a day and a half before I can give something back to the relationship. I’m in the house, but I’m not able to jump back into our normal routine with the same vigor. Sometimes I’m just feeling spent, and not eager to attend to household chores.
I do see myself at times as somewhat of an outsider in my own family. But I love that the girls connect so well with Lorrie, and I understand why my bonds with them are not as effortless. I get it: I’m more formal, I’m male, I’m older, I’m gone a lot.
Parents build up a bank account of interactions and memories with their children. Lorrie has had a lot more moments with the kids than I have, so her bank balance with the girls is higher than mine. Certainly, there’s a lot of love between me and the girls, but I know I have handicaps that I have to work to overcome.
My time away is a challenge. But Lorrie and I have been through great challenges together, and we have spent twenty years working through them. We work hard to find the right balance. We have both learned a lot about ourselves and each other and about what it takes to make a relationship work and to make it rewarding. We have both grown. By working on this together for each other and for our girls, we have become better people. We have invested in ourselves.
HOW DID my personal life, apart from my aviation experiences, prepare me for that journey to the Hudson? I think that these challenges Lorrie and I faced together made me better able to accept the cards I’ve been dealt—and to play them with all the resources at my disposal. Early in our marriage, Lorrie and I were dealt the challenge of infertility.
A year or so after we got married, Lorrie and I began planning to have a family. We spent a year trying to conceive, without success, and then went to a fertility specialist. For six months, Lorrie took Clomid to induce ovulation. Like many women on that drug, she gained weight, and that was troubling for her. She’d been in good shape before starting on the medication, and here, for reasons beyond her control, she just kept getting heavier. She put on thirty-five pounds.
One day she and I were in the car and she turned to me and said, “You never make a comment about how I look or about my weight.” My reply came naturally to me—I just said what I felt—but it meant a lot to Lorrie. I told her: “You don’t get it, do you? I love you for what’s on the inside.”
“That’s what every woman wants to hear,” she said, and she meant it.
Sometimes I get things right.
We kept trying to conceive, but I was off on trips a lot, which made it hard for Lorrie and me to connect at the appropriate moment. A couple of times, she flew to the city where I was staying on a layover so we wouldn’t “waste” a thirty-day cycle. It wasn’t exactly romantic. We were focused and a bit tense. We were on a mission.
The Clomid didn’t work, so eventually we turned to in vitro fertilization. The cost was $15,000—not covered by insurance—and we were told the success rate was about 15 percent. Lorrie needed to endure shots at 2 A.M. and 2 P.M., and when I was home, I’d give them to her. When I wasn’t home, she gave them to herself.
These were not easy times for Lorrie. “I feel like my body has betrayed me,” she’d say. “My body won’t do the one thing it was designed to do, the one thing that separates one gender from the other.” We’d been raising guide dogs for the blind, and a couple of the dogs were pregnant at the time. “It seems like everyone and every animal I meet is pregnant,” Lorrie would tell me. “Everyone except me.” I knew she felt deeply wounded, but I didn’t fully know how to help her.
I was the one who had to tell Lorrie that the in vitro effort hadn’t worked. She took one look at me and she knew. I had what she later described as a completely flat expression on my face.
I felt devastated for myself, but even more so for Lorrie. All I could say to her was: “Honey, I’m so sorry.” We hugged each other and she cried for a while. I tried to be stoic for her, but I was hurting, too.
We went back to the doctor, who told us we were both still relatively young—I was thirty-nine and Lorrie was thirty-one—and we should consider trying again.
Lorrie had gotten to know another woman who was a patient at the clinic, and on the day Lorrie learned she wasn’t pregnant, that woman was thrilled to learn she was. But then, a few days later, the woman was told that actually her pregnancy hadn’t taken. It was possibly more devastating to have such high hopes dashed. When Lorrie heard this news, she decided she’d had enough.
“What’s our main goal?” she asked me, and then she answered. “Our goal isn’t for me to be pregnant. Our goal is to have
a family. And there are other ways we can do that.”
Before she met me, Lorrie had been a longtime Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteer. She saw that as both a duty and a labor of love. She began mentoring her “little sister” when she was twenty-six and the girl was five. Now Lorrie is fifty and her little sister, Sara Diskin, is twenty-nine, and they’re still close. And so when Lorrie was unable to get pregnant, she was able to frame our predicament very clearly. “I’ve known for a long time,” she told me, “that the beauty of a relationship is not biology. I’m ready to move on.”
And so we decided we’d adopt.
Trying to adopt a baby was also an arduous journey—a long, difficult, emotional, expensive roller coaster—and we learned a lot about ourselves in the process.
Lorrie vowed to approach the adoption search as a full-time job. It took effort to educate ourselves about a process that was not well defined. There were many avenues. Which ones would pay off? Lorrie tried to have a business plan, but adoptions don’t always proceed logically.
The fortunes of adoptive parents vary according to the wishes of birth parents. Their names are buried deep on waiting lists, while their files get dissected at agencies by people who don’t really know them. There’s no clear order to the process.
Lorrie was very emotional through all of it, and my attempts at a workmanlike approach didn’t always help. “You don’t know how to console me,” she told me at one point. “It’s outside your parameters. You’re unable to feel things the way I feel them.”
Lorrie struggled with all the paperwork we had to file, and the fact that we had to “qualify” to be adoptive parents. It was hard for her. Throughout her infertility treatments, she was poked and prodded. She had surrendered her body in an effort to find her way to parenthood. She had shown her commitment. Now she was being asked to find friends who’d vouch for whether or not she could handle being a parent. It felt almost like an insult.
Lorrie and I handled all the paperwork very differently. One day we exchanged our answers to a set of questions. I had to tell Lorrie: “You’re overthinking this. Just answer the simple question with a direct answer.” She was grateful when I told her that. It allowed her to temper some of her anxiety about the process. She didn’t owe them her life story. She owed them basic answers to their questions.
We met with several sets of birth parents over the months that followed, hoping they’d select us. That was a hard process, too. Lorrie would often be excited after a meeting, certain that we’d get the nod. I tried to be logical and analytical. “Yes, that birth mother said a lot of nice things about us,” I’d tell Lorrie, “but think about what she didn’t say.” Lorrie said I was raining on her parade, but I felt we had to look at everything realistically or we’d set ourselves up for wave upon wave of disappointments.
We met with a variety of birth parents during our search. And then, on December 1, 1992, we flew down to San Diego to meet a woman who was seven months pregnant. The birth father was there, too.
The couple asked us about our lives, our dreams for the child we hoped to someday raise, my schedule as a pilot, everything. They were honest and clear-eyed as we spoke, and so were we. Not long after that, we got word: They had selected us to be the adoptive parents.
At 2 A.M. on January 19, 1993, we got a call that the birth mother was in the delivery room, and we should prepare to fly down to San Diego to pick up our new baby. Lorrie was too excited to sleep. As for me, the realist, I knew that I’d be a better father in the morning if I got some sleep. So I went back to bed. Lorrie couldn’t believe how I could sleep at a time like this. She stayed up, sitting by the phone, waiting.
Kate was born at 4 A.M., and we flew to San Diego just after sunrise. We brought a car seat with us because we’d need it in the rental car once we picked up the baby. Lorrie and I felt a little self-conscious walking through the airport with that empty car seat. Were people looking at us, wondering where our baby was?
When we arrived at the hospital, we went straight to the nursery and saw Kate for the first time; it was an overwhelming moment. I fell in love with her the second I saw her.
Later, a nurse was holding Kate. “Would the mother like to hold the baby?” the nurse asked. The birth mother pointed to Lorrie and said, “She’s the mother.” Lorrie was handed Kate.
Eventually, Lorrie had to use the bathroom, and while she was gone, Kate needed to have her diaper changed. I was proud to be the first of us to get to do that.
Early that afternoon, hospital staffers told us we were free to take Kate and go. Lorrie wanted to say good-bye to the birth mother. “What can you say to a woman who has given you this kind of gift?” she wondered. “I don’t think there are any words.”
Both of us considered the birth parents to be incredibly courageous people. They knew that for whatever reason—their age, circumstances, finances—they couldn’t raise their child. And so they had made a very hard yet loving choice. They had turned their wrenching dilemma into a gift.
Lorrie left the baby with me in the nursery—she thought it would be too hard for the birth mother to see Kate one last time—and she went into the birth mother’s hospital room. As she offered a simple thank-you, she saw a single tear running down the birth mother’s face.
“Just be good to her,” the birth mother said.
It was an overwhelming moment for both of them.
Hospital protocol requires new mothers to leave the hospital in a wheelchair. Lorrie tried to explain that she hadn’t given birth and didn’t need a wheelchair, but the aide with the wheelchair insisted on accompanying us out the front door. And so we walked, holding Kate, as the empty wheelchair was pushed beside us. It was ridiculous and surreal, but it was an amazingly happy moment, too.
In the parking lot, it almost felt as if we had stolen Kate. We looked over our shoulders, wondering if someone would be coming back to get her. We ended up putting her in our car seat, driving a mile from the hospital, and pulling over to the curb.
We looked at each other. We looked at Kate, who looked up at us. I wasn’t crying, but it was as emotional a moment as I’ve ever had in my life. I was a father.
Just fourteen hours after being born, Kate was on her first airplane ride, heading back with us to Northern California. As an aviator, I was certainly happy to get her into the air that quickly.
Two years later, another birth mother looked through thirty-six bios in a book of potential adoptive parents, and after meeting Lorrie and me, agreed to make us parents for the second time. On January 6, 1995, when the call came that the birth mother had gone into labor with Kelly, I was in Pittsburgh, receiving simulator training on the MD-80. I cut short my training and made plans to return home as soon as possible, which was the following morning.
Lorrie, meanwhile, headed to the hospital. For the birth mother, it was a very long labor, and Lorrie stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, just waiting. Unlike when Kate was born, this time Lorrie was in the delivery room, and the whole day had a cinematic feel to it. There was a huge storm outside, with rain coming down in buckets and a howling wind. Then, when Kelly was finally crowning, a nurse gasped and said, “Oh my gosh!”
Lorrie was taken aback. “What, what, what?” she said, her heart pounding.
The nurse answered, “We’ve got a redhead!”
As soon as Kelly arrived, just after 10 A.M., the doctor handed her to Lorrie, which was an overwhelming moment for her. The rain. The thunder. This new beautiful baby. And I missed it all. While Lorrie was cuddling Kelly in the first seconds of her life, I was above the clouds somewhere over Denver.
I made it to the hospital that afternoon, and seeing Kelly for the first time was another moment of instant love and gratitude. And the most amazing thing was how much Kelly looked like me when I was a baby: the shape of our heads, our eyes, our Irish coloring. I was strawberry blond as a boy. We’d later mount baby photos of me and Kelly side by side in a frame, and it was hard to tell us apart. It’s inter
esting how that goes in an adoption sometimes. Lorrie likes to say that we are blessed to have children who resemble us. It’s not that we need the girls to look like us, but it’s nice that they do. And over the years, it meant that if we opted not to voluntarily tell various people about the adoptions right away, we didn’t have to.
Kelly’s adoption was more complicated than Kate’s. There are a lot of factors that can slow down the paperwork—or even make it fall through. It’s hard for birth mothers to make their decisions final. They often have family pressures to consider.
Lorrie and I had to deal with some of these issues, and we struggled with the uncertainty. We passed the hours at a restaurant called Taxi’s, which was near the hospital. We ate lunch and dinner there while we anxiously waited for the paperwork to come through. We were deathly afraid, with time passing, that some bureaucratic snafu could lead other issues to unravel, and keep the adoption from being finalized. At one point, I had a very forceful conversation with the hospital administrator, telling him that the hospital had to get its act together. I was pretty worked up and assertive, but it was necessary to break the logjam.
On the day we brought Kelly home, we had her in a car seat in the back of our car. Two-year-old Kate came out of the house and stared quizzically at this baby. She thought Kelly was a new doll she was getting as a present. She’d soon know better.
Out there at the car, Lorrie and I looked at each other and I said what I was thinking: “We’re a real family now.”
As we get deeper into our marriage, Lorrie and I have become big believers in the idea that we should focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have. We have weathered some serious storms in our relationship, but on a lot of fronts, we feel closer than ever now. And we really try to live in a way that allows for the word gratitude. In fact, Lorrie has since made a career as an outdoors fitness expert, helping other women stay in shape physically and emotionally. As part of her work, she teaches women about the power of accepting life as it presents itself, and enjoying that life.
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