How a schlep to the Middle East with my elderly mother healed our relationship

nypost.com:

many “multifunctional pockets”  — my mother found her passport. Again.And I contemplated taking my emergency Valium. Again.We were en route to my 82-year-old mother’s belated 80th-birthday present — a trip to Qatar and Oman — two years too late due to COVID.For years, my mom had said, “I’d like to travel with you” — a request that I’d put off still shaken by the last family trip my mother, sister and I took in 2000 to Greece, which was slightly disastrous… and after which my mother and I didn’t really speak for several years.But, as my mom and I both aged and mellowed, I started to reconsider.

After all, if my right wing, born again, gun toting father and I could travel together after all these years, couldn’t I try with my left wing, liberal if not slightly argumentative mom?So, I offered her a trip to the Middle East and my adventurous mother was in… but not without some trepidation.I’d already talked her out of buying an abaya for the trip.“It’s not necessary, Mom,” I’d said when she called me up two weeks before the trip to announce her impending purchase.“But Rosie said I need one!”“Rosie from Cincinnati, Ohio, who has never been to Qatar or Oman?” I asked.“Yes — but she reads the papers!”“Fine, do what you want,” I said, “but you will literally be the only woman in an abaya for miles around — you don’t even have to wear one in Saudi Arabia anymore!”She didn’t buy one but noted that if anything went wrong “you told me not to buy it!”I’d secured us business class seats on one of the best airlines, Qatar Airways.

It was to be many firsts for my mom. Her first time in Qatar and Oman and her first time flying business class.“Wait? Can I keep this?” She asked when the stewardess handed her a Qatar Airways sleep suit.