A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

Monday Offspring Blogging

David Brooks is a pansy (registration required):

It's summertime, which means many people these days are flying with children, an experience that can be enriching and exciting, and is followed by memories that linger even after the shell shock, nightmares and trauma-induced facial tics have faded away.

Any airplane trip with children begins before boarding in the airport gate area, where the parents, dreading the next four hours of high-altitude agony, will be laying down a bed of psychic tension that will be the karmic foundation for everything that is to come. They will be coaching their children on how to behave, spreading maniacally upbeat good cheer and exuding the waves of anxiety that are almost clinically certain to produce a toddler meltdown.

I can see something like this happening for parents flying with children for the first time. After that, they adopt the attitude recommended to me by a helpful flight attendant on SWSNBN's first airplane trip (to Philadelphia) when she was about two months old. She was letting me hole up in the galley for a bit after a diaper change, while the little poopsmith dropped back off to sleep. I thanked her, saying I was sure the other passengers appreciated not being near a crying baby. Her response? "Fuck 'em. You have just as much right to be here as they do. They can take the bus if they don't like it."

I made a quick mental note to avoid eye contact from that point on, even as I nodded my assent.

Since then, my daughter has flown four more times. I recently added a DVD player to my laptop so she could watch her baby crack Elmo DVDs, but half the time on this last flight she didn't need them, being content to play with the airphone, the window, or the assortment of books and magazines we brought. Not since her maiden trip, however, have I experienced anything approaching "waves of anxiety."

That is, no more than usual when boarding a giant metal coffin that will soon be hurtling through the air at unnatural speeds.

The airlines helpfully have families with small children board first, which gives parents an extra 45 minutes to play peekaboo even before the plane takes off. As the craft fills up, it becomes clear they and their kids have been seated in a special sadist section, among Idi Amin, the etiquette committee of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a perfect 4-year-old wonder child who will spend the whole flight quietly reading The Economist.

Parents in these early stages of a flight usually devote their fevered energies to entertaining their children. Many parents begin by reading board books in that super-attenuated nursery school tone of voice, and then, sadly, singing to their children every song they know, beginning with age-appropriate lullabies and ending up with a medley of hits from the Spice Girls.

Easy there.

Toddlers sense when their parents are running out of first-rate material and begin squirming and rebelling. This causes the parents to frantically redouble their efforts to distract and entertain, and soon they are behaving like Jerry Lewis on a sugar high - acting out any desperately silly routine they think will occupy their little ones' minds and keep them from letting out their inner Damiens.

Here's a hint for future parents out there: pre-boarding is for suckers, and for precisely the reasons Brooks describes. All getting on the plane early does is provide an extra 45 minutes for your kid to get bored with being on the plane early. We spend the initial boarding calls letting SWSNBN run around the gate and tire herself out, then get on with the rest of the stragglers.

We also don't have any more gear than anybody else, save for a diaper bag that's malleable enough after 19 months of use to squeeze, rat-like, through cracks 2 inches wide. It's no problem to crush it into the overhead bin. While everybody else's kid is freaking out after being read all their Dr. Seuss books twice, ours is still enjoying the fabulous bargains offered in the SkyMall catalog.

It is an iron rule of plane travel that the parents who are trying to hush their children are more annoying to their fellow passengers than the children who are being hushed. Accordingly, other fliers in the area begin to develop hostile feelings toward the desperately shushing parents.

Right. An "iron rule." Makes me wonder where "shushing parents" rank in inflight annoyance alongside drunks, those with poor personal hygiene, and guys who yell across the aisle at each other about what great golf games they had.

Anybody who thinks it takes a village to raise a child has never sat near a crying baby in first class. In these circumstances, if it were up to the village, somebody would be stapling the brat's mouth shut and somebody else would be locking mom in the overhead storage compartment.

Brooks has now effectively lost the 99.5% of his audience that doesn't fly first class. Shit, I've been flying for 30 years and have only been in business class once, and that was thanks to a British Airways flight attendant who took pity on us during the Great Passport Crisis of 1999 (a story for another time).

The children are now completely out of control and are behaving as if they were raised by feral wolves. They will be pummeling the seat in front of them with their feet or else playing other manic airplane games, such as Tray Table Trampoline. Amid the frenzy, parents will observe that one child has turned green, which means that every passenger along the aisle between them and the restroom will be an unwitting participant in a contest called Air Sickness Roulette.

This whole thing reads like a bad stand-up routine. I kept waiting for him to start talking about the food next.

The final hour of the flight is aptly captured by Picasso's painting "Guernica." Parents are strewn about in heaps, hardened air marshals are weeping under the strain, the kids look like flesh-eating Beanie Babies, and the pilots emerge to complain that because of the kids' crying they can't hear the air traffic controllers (this actually happened to my family).

Gee Dave, you must sit in...First Class.

I keep these "offspring entries" to a minimum because I know few of my childless readers want to constantly hear about what a blessed wonder my perfect genius of a baby is. Even when I do, I try to avoid the mistake Brooks is making, i.e. telling hyperbolic tales of his valiant adventures in parenting. You chose to have kids, Dave. So did I. Raise them without acting like a martyr and maybe they'll grow up less whiny than their dad.