I saw the way you looked at her, and then back at me. Disgusted. Annoyed. You glanced at your friend conspiratorially; your face said, “Why would she bring a child here?” You were genuinely bothered. I imagine you think the best place for her is at home. But not in front of a TV. I know your type; you have a lot of opinions about how other people parent their children. But I already answer to someone else’s needs; I’m not here to police her into stillness and silence for your benefit.
Since you were wondering though, I brought my 2 year old to an art museum for the same reason you and your “I’m too elevated to procreate” bestie with your ironic haircuts and acid wash everything came to this art museum. It was cold, and rainy, and we wanted to get out of the house. We wanted to see art. We are on week 1 of 45 of cold weather here in the Midwest; we’re all just trying not to lose our minds. And you’ll be seeing us around, so get used to it.
Sure, sure she was screaming and running there for a second. It took me a minute to catch up to her, because she is fast… in hindsight, a SkyZone would have been a better choice for that day’s activity, but you know… hindsight…
If tranq guns were legal, I’d use it. You weren’t the first one with that thought. It’d be easier than intentional parenting. Reciting: “no touching, no running, no yelling” didn’t do the trick, but there we were, trying to get some culture with nothing but snacks and empty threats to enforce good behavior: when my kid started acting like a kid. But remind me again why you’re more deserving of a public appearance?
You know, the only thing more annoying than kids, are self-important adults who think they’re the only ones who deserve a seat on a plane, a booth at a restaurant, or a walk on the beach. Fine people of the world, listen up: you have to share. This seems as difficult a concept for you as it is my toddler. But I catch your glances when I’m out, I overhear your conversations at my work, and I see your posts on the Internet. People’s kids annoy you and you’re entitled enough to think you have more ownership over a public space, you think you get to weigh in on parenting from the sidelines.
You think of children the way Trump looks at immigrants. You want them gone, out of sight, and you’d like to forget where you, yourself came from. Have some respect for the process that allowed you to be here. Someone already paid your procreation dues. Yes, hats off to your parents who took one for the team and followed through with you. God knows they deserved a handicap in the game of life.
She’s still new here. Like to the planet. So she’s excitable. And she likely will be for the next few years. Imagine every time you went somewhere, did something, or had a sensory experience it was like showing up to a bar and finding out it’s half off everything. Her life right now is an endless happy hour. She doesn’t understand yet that a lot of people need alcohol to be happy or nice and only get 48 hours a week to do what they want. Let her have this, adulthood is as certain as the long winter.
I used to think my life ended when hers began, now I know it restarted, and it came with a serving of humility. Because my baby is going to cry on your flight, she’s going to stop walking directly in front of you in a busy place, and she’s going to peak over the booth to say hello. It’s not always a reflection of my parenting; it’s the nature of a child. They’re sweeter than us both, and luckily more forgiving. So the next time you see a parent in the midst of a situation larger than what they can control (the entirety of parenthood), offer a hand? Or maybe just smile. Because you look ugly with that joyless judgment on your face. And your haircut is stupid.
Scarlett Longstreet is a stay at home-ish mom, writer, and bartender. She lives in a suburb of Detroit with her husband and daughter. She’s trying to be a slightly less insane parent than her own (low bar). You can read her work at www.spilledmilkclub.com and find her on Instagram (Instagram.com/scarlettLongstreet) and Facebook (Facebook.com/thespilledmilkclub).
4 Comments
Amen!
And yet there are other societies and cultures where kids aren’t the disruptive hellions that run amok in America. I’m free to dislike kids screaming in public, and their parents that think this behavior is typical of all children, because I’ve seen what actual behaved kids are like in other countries. So yes, if you have an obnoxiously loud and ill-disciplined brat that you’re defending, I will judge you when you bring it to public spaces.
In response to the overgeneralized, blanket assertion that American kids are more ill- behaved than elsewhere in the world, here are some caveats to consider: Before you give in to the sweet lure confirmation bias, ask yourself if you have spent equal time in all these other places as you do, stateside, because that will greatly skew the likelihood of witnessing a pediatric meltdown to where you most frequent.
Also, keep in mind the human tendency to hyperfocus on highly uncomfortable experiences and apply more weight to them than might be proportionate to the actual, qualitative egregiousness of the situation. Once you have that rhetorical meme of “unruly children” firmly in your mind, it’s like having a hammer in-hand and going on a quest for nails everywhere. Top that off with a tendency toward attribution errors (like instead of assuming something understandable may have happened to lead up to it, you assume there is something inherently wrong/bad about the people), then you take the easy route to condemnation without truly understanding anything in reality., because that’s just more expeditious and convenient.
I used to be guilty of this. I admit it. I judged parents of unruly kids from age eighteen until thirty five.
I didn’t have my first and only child until I was 37. She is now thirteen (hoo boy, raising a teen has its own issues), and hindsight is so very 20/20 when you have been in both camps, almost the same amount of time. She was such an amazing, well-traveled kid who ate anything, and she was a superstar on flights, but that ONE time out of over ten flights we had to return home on a delayed flight that became a redeye, when she was two years old, and we made it all the way to the baggage carousel at 2 am before she had just HAD it… and some business woman comes and stands over us while I am on the floor with my daughter, trying to calm her, to scold and berate me because my daughter was crying for all of two minutes, start to finish. I guess the best time to kick a parent is while we’re down, you know, a-la The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, and no, lady, I am not leaving the airport without my luggage, so I will live with looking like a Bad Parent for another whole minute so I can efficiently get our bags and leave, sooner than later.
PS: In case of the need for context on all that jargon I just spewed about cognitive biases: https://youtu.be/hO2pBE8WI5g