Two years had passed since our move from Southern California to suburban Atlanta, and it had been a painful extraction, uprooting my boys from their schools and friends — all for my love of a man, Jon, who then remained entangled in his previous marriage and hesitant to forge ahead with me.

My own first marriage had dissolved nearly a decade before when my boys were little, and in Jon I knew I had found a shared future. Yet it remained stubbornly beyond my grasp.

So once again I was traveling on Christmas Day, sparing us having to endure another Christmas morning that didn’t jibe with the TV version. We were escaping to San Diego to find comfort among uncles, aunts and cousins, and in the familiar sun and sands.

While waiting to board, I spied a beautiful young woman wrangling two small boys, toddlers who looked as if they were in orbit around her, running, screaming and spinning. I guessed immediately that she was also a single mother.

People who fly on Christmas morning tend to be either those who are burning up expiring frequent flier miles, or airline personnel and their families flying in “nonrevenue” seats. Insiders know that Christmas-morning flights allow easier redemption and lighter fares — plus a one-day respite in the holiday travel rush.

But with rare exception, women flying with very small children by themselves on this morning are single mothers. Sometimes life’s circumstances are just too raw to pretend we are happily celebrating. Sometimes treating the day like an average weekday, as I was doing, is the path to take. My boys and I had spent more than one Christmas morning on an airplane.

After meeting Jon, though, I did not think we’d be doing this again. There is something relentlessly compelling about the kind of love that causes you to change your life in a way that friends insist is insane and causes your family to wince and ask, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Jon and I had agreed about having the boys and me move east so we all could be together and “blend” our families. But after we arrived, he balked: his divorce was still too fresh, the ex-wife boundaries were not in place, and our engagement was broken off twice.

He had only pretended to be ready so he wouldn’t lose me. And I kept pretending to be patient while he worked it out. But after two years of waiting I was readying myself to move back to San Diego. I was angry and disappointed. The holidays were supposed to be a family time, yet we still weren’t a family. I loved Jon and he loved me. But love was not conquering our blended family obstacles or making him any more ready for what I needed.

So I used up my flight miles and bolted with the boys for Christmas. I re-read the second-marriage divorce statistics to justify my decision.

In the airport terminal, the other woman’s boys looked to be about 2 and 3. For a five-hour flight, that’s a tall order. And even taller in this case, as the older boy was wearing a halo neck brace, evidence of some recent trauma requiring his cervical spine and head to be immobilized. His energy, however, was unimpaired.

On the plane, as my sons settled in with their books and portable electronics, the woman and her boys found their seats two rows behind us in 16B and C — the younger on her lap, the older in the middle seat next to a man with a look of unmitigated dread.

Both toddlers immediately started screaming. The one in the halo was loudly protesting the mandatory seat belt aspect of airline travel. The other didn’t want to sit on his mother’s lap. I knew that rodeo well. Only five more hours of screaming to go.

When we hit cruising altitude, I exchanged a knowing glance with my boys, unbuckled my seat belt, went back two rows, and offered my seat to the ashen-faced man in 16A. He looked spectacularly relieved. I wished him a merry Christmas, sat next to the woman, and offered what every mother traveling alone with small ones wants: an extra pair of hands.

Laura Wilkinson Sinton is a media communications executive in Atlanta.

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