I Love an Airport Pat-down

when a stranger's touch is the most gratifying touch

I have a pair of jeans with a big brass button on them, not the most comfortable, but I wear them every time we fly. Ushering all four of my kids through with my husband, I play the rearguard, pretending to attend to stray coats, checking that devices are out of bags and in bins, looking entirely busy.

Then, line mounting behind me, I walk through, extra slow, waiting for that siren song of the alarm. It’s like catnip.

Ma’am, step aside. Gladly. The snap of the TSA-issued gloves. I’m ready.

I’ve spent 102 of the 120 months of the last decade growing babies and nursing them. My body has been in hotter demand than a Victoria’s Secret model. 

Middle of the night bad dream? Find mom’s body on mom’s side of the bed and curl your sweaty self in. Want a sandwich? Break down the bathroom door and jump aboard: she sits! always! Feel aggressive toward your younger brother? Punch a mom butt instead. Feel shy in public? Lift that skirt for all the neighborhood to see and you shall be returned to harbor. 

In my family, my body is public property. An open house, staged with cookies laid out on the refurbished quartz countertops. 

At the pearly security gates, the person patting me down is just so attentively indifferent. She doesn’t really want to discover anything: her job is to be careful, deliberate, make me feel safe and keep everyone else safe should I be unsafe. 

People in uniform tell my children to back off, and like a bird, wings stretched, I surrender to her, my TSA agent. It’s my pietà moment.

The professional swirl of a gloved hand under and around my breasts, the brush around my waist, the spiraling down each leg. The grazing caress of the backs of gloved hands. It’s the Bolshoi Ballet. 

This must be how petals feel under butterfly wings. 

I toe-dipped this confession at dinner with girlfriends, one of whom told me, not unsmugly and not without a little jealousy on my part, that on one of her pat-downs, the TSA agent said, “everyone should dress like you for a flight.” (Spandex and t-shirt, should you also be curious.) Many at the table found it absurd until we began to talk about the tactile rush of having your hair washed and blowdried. 

As a woman, to be touched safely by a stranger is no small thing.

The word “touch” dropped in use in published texts after the 1950s, only to come back with an alarming upswing in 2019. Google doesn’t have word frequency data past 2019, and I like to think that somehow, the writers of the world understood: get touch in there, before the year that will feel almost touch-less. 

Studying the importance of touch, Harry Harlow separated rhesus monkeys from their mothers and created surrogate mothers out of wire in a highly controversial study. He covered some of the inanimate mothers with terry cloth, but gave the wire-only mothers a feeding bottle. Again and again, the baby monkeys returned to the cloth-covered mother, choosing softness over sustenance.

The study of touch, haptic communication, comes from the Greek haptόs, which translates to "palpable", and haptikόs, "suitable for touch", or more literally: the ability "to grasp something".

And so, in some strange fateful dance, I grasp something: the TSA agent, I think, is my mother. I, again, am child.

In this moment, arms spread, I look to my adult life and say:

Don’t wait for me– I’ll catch you at the gate.