But not for that!
On a flight back from visiting family in Croatia one summer when Ari was two years old, he screamed bloody murder for hours. Hours! Here’s something no one warned me about before I was a mom: parents who are flying with young children don’t rest on flights. (Also, vacationing with your kids isn’t an actual vacation. It’s the same old exhausting motherhood routine but with a prettier view.) Ari couldn’t fall asleep earlier in the day for his usual nap, so by the time we were seven hours into our eleven-hour flight, he was completely exhausted and delirious.
I was carrying him up and down the aisles, trying to soothe him, but my precious, precious, precious little boy (if you say “precious” enough times, your child will seem precious even when there’s nothing precious about him #liesitellmyself) wasn’t just screaming with his vocal cords, he was screaming with his entire body, arching his back and thrashing like a little porpoise baby. I struggled just to keep him in my arms. Everyone was staring at us. Some people looked concerned. Some people looked annoyed. Some people looked like they wanted to murder us. My child was that child, the child you never, ever want to be stuck with for a long flight in an enclosed capsule in the sky.
I, somehow, very awkwardly, while pretending I still had a touch of gracefulness left in me, managed to get myself and the precious maniac I was holding to the back of the airplane without his taking anyone out with his “passionate” acrobatic moves. I folded myself into the restroom with him to give the other passengers some peace, but I could stand to be stuck in that tiny little box that smells like urine with a screaming child for only so long before I completely started to lose my marbles. I left the restroom and crouched down in the back of the plane, holding him while he continued kicking and punching. I was singing to him, I was bribing him, I was trying to breathe slowly so he wouldn’t sense my stress, and then in the middle of all this chaos, a woman approached me with a very annoyed look and asked me, “Um, ma’am, did you forget to feed him today? Because he’s obviously hungry.”
Was she serious? Had I fed him? No. I didn’t think to feed him today. I feed my children only on special occasions. Then a few minutes later (a time span that felt like weeks of excruciating torture), another person approached me and in a very harsh, preachy tone said, “You need to put him down. He doesn’t want to be held. Put him down!”
WE WERE ON AN AIRPLANE!!! If I put the kid down, he would throw himself through the aisles and hit a beverage cart. Or he would cause immeasurable chaos, screaming in other people’s faces, punching and kicking them, and we would be asked to leave the airplane immediately, which, by the way, would really suck because we were flying over the Atlantic Ocean at that moment. (And speaking of beverage carts, what I could have really used was a beverage or three or five, but nobody was offering me one. I was offered only judgmental looks and advice. Brilliant, useless, unsolicited advice.)
And then, a little while later, with my son still screaming as if he were trying to make sure all the passengers in all the other airplanes in the sky heard him, too, yet another person approached me. This time, there was no judgment on his face, no hatred shooting like lasers out of his eyes. The man looked at me in the most caring way and said, “You’re doing great. I just wanted you to know that. I know how you feel. I’ve been there, flying with my baby years ago. Hang in there. You’re really doing great.” My shoulders instantly relaxed. With a few simple sentences, that man relieved me of so much stress. With tears in my eyes, I wanted to scream, “You win!!! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!! You win, sir! You are the winner of the compassionate, decent human award!!”
Eventually, my toddler exhausted himself into oblivion and slept. But I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that it wasn’t because I followed the advice of two strangers who assumed they knew my child’s personality,