Packing and repacking. Zip-lock bags for small size toiletries. Long lines at security. Shoes off, laptops out, keys and phones and change dropped into a container.
Maybe a search for good measure.
You arrive at your gate. There’s waiting. More waiting.
Eventually, you board – and you count your blessings because you feel as if one more inconvenience is going to send you over the edge. Unless of course, you have good drugs.
Legal, naturally.
And then it starts.
The kid behind you is kicking. The baby four rows back howls. A brother and sister on the other side of the aisle are tussling. And you haven’t even left the tarmac.
Now about that screaming infant or toddler, and those fussy four and five-year olds. Contrast this with the oasis of calm you convinced yourself awaited you. So how do you react?
Traveling With Kids
A recent news item brought it all back to yours truly, as a toddler’s tantrum got an entire family kicked off a JetBlue flight.
I know what it’s like being a passenger on one of those flights, and it’s dreadful! Then again, I’m equally aware of the parent’s perspective. Traveling anywhere with little ones, particularly overseas, can be a nightmare.
My transatlantic trips for business?
They were usually solo, and there were plenty. It was tough enough to catch any zzzzzzs at all, much less within earshot of a squalling infant. And may I add that it’s especially aggravating when flying all night, and knowing you have to be “on” when you arrive at the break of dawn, ready to pull off a productive work day?
Then again, flying the friendly skies with my own children – as infants, toddlers, and kiddos – not so simple. Occasionally I hauled my babes in arms (and front packs and back packs) on a business trip. The precious progeny were deposited with a doting mother-in-law, and I would hop a train to Paris to do my corporate thing as she enjoyed the pleasure of a few days with her grand-babies.
But for the most part, overseas travel with my boys was not combined with business travel. It involved visits to see their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins. Duty visits, if you will. At times, like most babies, they cried. Color me apoplectic!
Still, I consider myself fortunate. They were rarely a handful. And as for their good behavior, I chalk that up to a four-letter word that rhymes with truck – LUCK.
Ban Babies From Flights?
So what about this family booted off the plane in somewhat seemingly dramatic fashion? And the $2,000 it cost them?
What have we come to? Is “How to pack for overseas travel” now a matter of “leave the kids, take everything else?”
Is air travel so miserable as it is, that babies and toddlers should be shown the door? Or have we become so intolerant of so much – short-sighted and short-tempered – that we can’t deal with a few challenges?
What about families who need to see relatives on the other side of an ocean or across the country? Or dare to take a vacation? Can’t we find a small bit of sympathy for them?
I’ve been in both positions. They’re both a drag. Still, I say – let the airlines offer up those awful earphones to all the passengers and call it a day. Or, along with the requirements for carry-ons and zip-lock bags, remind us to bring our own. And some of those good drugs.
I love that your blog is in French too! Makes me feel so worldly.
What a lovely thing to say, Robin. Merci!
I have conflicting views: surely if I were a passenger on that flight, especially if it were a long 13+ hour flight, I’d wish that there were no crying babies/screaming kids, especially if they sat next to me. However, that’d be only a fleeting thought/wish, the same way I wish grown-ups who talk loudly and non-stop throughout the entire flight would shut up. I’d never be one that advocates no kids allowed on flights. That’s just ridiculous. And people that are PRO-LIFE better not be advocating this either: kids are human beings too. They have rights.
Is traveling on plane a right or a privilege? I’d say a right (which you have to pay for).
And you cannot blame the parents without knowing the whole story: it is possible that kids have autism, or some other issues. So are you going to tell those parents that they cannot travel by plane? Most of the crying will be droned out by the loud engine noise anyway. And if you are a frequent traveler, invest in a nice pair of headphones!
Your response gave me pause (and a chuckle)… “a right that you pay for.” Uh-huh. (That’s the pause; the chuckle is over the pro-lifers.)
Perhaps planes are a sort of Gilligan’s Island/Lost/Lord of the Flies microcosm of the human condition, with babies as the most vulnerable and psychically open pieces of that often scared and frustrated puzzle. Perhaps the babies cry that hellish steel tube’s collective Promethean wail?
There are numerous parables to the effect that hell is a place where people are prevented from eating by some bizarre torture and heaven is the same set-up but the people help each other.
What if seasoned parents flying without children were offered upgrade to business class, but there were no arrogant “business people” tuning out the rabble with champagne and Xanax, but rather a nursery where babies could be soothed by loving mother-figures who were not so much scared and frustrated as delighted to take a nap with a baby on one’s chest, or play with some toys or look at picture books.
To the extent that this sounds utterly implausible could be a mark of just how far we’ve fallen, not from eating apples in the garden, but from our pre-myth biological beginnings, not as savages but as social animals in cliffs and caves who left flying to birds and lacked the hubris to roll, chariot, locomote, and fly as we now do it—with tattered pockets, red faces, white knuckles and unquiet lonely hearts.
I’m not for a return to ignorance, but rather toward a Thoreau/Whitman/Rumi consciousness that got over being so impressed with our “inventions” (and with squeezing every last nickel out of them) and which allowed the illuminated heart to take flight rather than the twitching, neglected, alienated industrial brain.
It sometimes strikes me as ironic, when I’m sitting nauseous in the back-most row of some fume-filled turbulent root-canal of a flight, that even though I’m just wishing it will end the survival odds are better for that row than for the luxury class in the case of a crash. Which reminds me, in case of serious trouble on Infant Atlantic, the nursery section clearly should move to the back of the plane and the brave folks take up their sad spots in “first class.”
It may be implausible, Bruce – but I love your idea of a “nursery” area on the plane, and even the sharing of children to hold, to comfort, to play with. Oh, quite the idealistic viewpoint – but a lovely concept. (Much better than Ryan Air’s “strap-em-in-standing” attitude!)
Oh, have we come to this? Really? I understand the need for seat belts, but between you and me, two looks a lot like 23 months, and I held my ‘lap child’ when she was a new two. I figured the wails were worse, and it was my acceptance of risk.
I’ve sat next to snorers, loud talkers, people who use ear phones as speakers. I’ve had my space taken over. But never wished the person off the plane. We all have places to go.
If only trains were fast and reliable here, it’d be the perfect way to go!
I know what you mean, Kate. But families are so widely dispersed now that even trains won’t displace the need to get on a plane with babies and toddlers.
Love your comparison to the snorers, the loud talkers, and so on. Quite right.