There was actual drama around the most recent Mom, Interrupted in the Ahwatukee Foothills News. I submitted it, the column ran, and I got mail from someone who was irked about it.
Now, that’s not exactly news. If someone bothers to fire up their email after reading something I’ve written, frequently it’s because they’re, well, bothered. I always write them back. Sometimes they write back again. Once it actually turned into a flame war.
But this was the first time anyone bothered to copy the editor AND the publisher. That gave me pause.
So there’s a little bit of reading to do here. First, read the article that I wrote last summer. I was working that angle a little again, but with a twist, with the column that ran last Wednesday. Link-phobic folk can hit the ‘read more’ to see it here on the site.
As it turns out, the complaint I received centered around the fact that
a) she thought there would be tips on traveling with toddlers and there weren’t any but
b) she didn’t need any tips because her cherubs are paragons of virtue whilst traveling to the point where
c) not only do business travelers not dread being seated next to the little angels, they compete to see who can give her six-month-old their iPad to play with and
d) the only thing that even looked like a traveling tip was, in her words, ‘appalling.’
You’ve been warned.
If you ask the mother of a toddler whether she’d like to re-enact the Bataan Death March or fly across the country with her toddler, she’ll probably think for a minute and ask, “What’s the difference?”
I don’t blame her. Nothing turns a happy young mother into a pariah faster than that walk down the jet way with a diaper bag, because nothing strikes terror into the heart of your average business traveler quite like arriving at his seat to find that the occupants of 21E and 21F are a weary young mom and a toddler who has clearly missed a nap.
The young mom sees the resigned look crossing his face that roughly translates into, “You have GOT to be kidding me!” Followed by, “How quickly can I start drinking on this flight?” And she cringes, because she’s wishing she could credibly score some wine, too.
We talked about this last year, after I witnessed a tot flip out of the tank right after his parents cleared security at Tampa International. I’ve been traveling a bit since then and now I think there’s more to this than simple toddler containment and my traveling comfort.
That mom is walking a delicate line here: pre-flight, she has spent a fair amount of time teaching that kid that she’s not going to cave to tantrums. During the flight, the combined weight of an Airbus 321’s communal irritation is a metric tonne of pressure for her to turn into Neville Chamberlain and hand that kid the Alsace Lorraine (in this case, that’s a metaphor for a pound bag of M&Ms and all day access to her iPad) to keep him from invading Poland (another metaphor for kicking my seat for three hours).
For those few hours, the rest of us are begging her to fold like a tortilla and hand that kid whatever he wants if he will Just. Be. Quiet. If she gives in, she’s undoing months of work all for a few hours of peace.
Do we really want the children of the world to learn that whining gets results? We’ll all be living with that for years, not just the few hours it takes to land at LaGuardia.
The tiny tyrant who learns that pitching a fit gets results and that bad behavior is tolerated grows up to be the entitled twit who texts her buddies throughout a job interview, or the affluenza victim who drunk drives and kills four people, or the young adult who pulls some other headline-grabbing stunt that makes you decry the state of the world today.
Yes, it’s annoying to listen to a preschooler learn patience and manners, in a plane or in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. It can be excruciating when there’s no escape. But even if you went out of your way not to have children so as not to have to deal with this, you still have to live in a world that’s run by someone else’s kids.
Let’s help them get raised right.
Helpful tip: When you’re flying with kids, give the baby something to suck on to help relieve ear pain when the cabin pressure changes.
Or buy me, your seat mate, a beer to suck on. That relieves my ear pain, too.
• Ahwatukee Foothills resident Elizabeth Evans can be reached at elizabethann40@hotmail.com.
© E. Stocking Evans 2015
Mom, Interrupted 
Oo.. Ooo… Oooo! I have a tip, I have a tip!!!
Instead of flying a commercial airline where you are guaranteed to be processed and packed like sardines into a long metal tube with hundreds of your fellow travelers, drive yourself, or book a charter flight and preserve the sanctity of your personal aura.
Let’s face it, the American public has spoken. We have sacrificed our privacy for the supposed security of assigning some mindless TSA automaton to paw through our luggage and feel up our grandmothers. We have also decided it is better to save on airfare and so we let whoever happens to buy the discount seat next to, in front of, or behind us to (in turn) drool on our shoulder, sit in our lap, and punch our kidneys.
Personally I like the activity of flying. Soaring through the sky, seeing the world from on high; chasing through clouds, then landing in some far flung place; It’s the stuff of romance and adventure. But in turns airlines, airports, and the government have succeeded in sucking the joy from air travel; and they’ve done it because that’s what we want.
It used to be that the journey was at least as important as the destination; but no more. Now it doesn’t matter how you get there; so long as it’s cheap, safe, and quick. Honestly I think some of us would be happier if we could just pack ourselves into boxes and crates and ship ourselves overnight! Goodness knows that sounds better than sharing half my seat with whoever fate sets down next to me. But for the moment, that isn’t an option.
Till then, the destination must be compelling enough to warrant suffering the trip. Work might be reason enough; but traveling for pleasure is increasingly harder to imagine.
I sympathize with the frustrated and squabbling toddler. I feel the exact same way he does. But if I kick and scream the flight crew calls in the police and takes me off the plane. Hell, if I even look displeased they give me the stink eye and make ready issue ultimatums.
What must their jobs be like? They have to spend their days keeping the sardines firmly packed in place until the flight lands and the compressed mass of crumpled, uncomfortable, stinking and complaining humanity is replaced by another, and another, and another. Sometimes I wonder just how different their jobs are from those who loaded box cars destined for concentration camps.
As a parent traveling with a child (and I’ve done this), I found my tykes often to be a reflection of my own worry, frustration and anxiety. The calmer and more relaxed I was, so were they. But as any parent knows when you start putting stress on a kid the kid is going to react. Public transportation, particularly cheap public transportation, is big on stress. I think some people try to make it better; and they are bright moments of unexpected kindness in an otherwise dismal experience; but the fact is they don’t get paid to care because we’re not paying them to care.
So suck it up butter-cup and make the best of it that you can. We all have choices when we travel and this is YOUR flight.
You realize, of course, that you just compared flight attendants to Nazis. You wanna reframe that?