Any parent who has flown with child in tow has at least one hellish story to share. My personal worst had to do with a cancelled flight, a second pass at the trip the next morning, three flights, two terminals, one parent, two children (turning three plus infant) and ONE diaper. This past week, I arrived at the airport for another trip with two different children (mine, too) ages eight and barely three and discovered our three seats stacked like those plastic beads you pop together: three of us in three rows, middle seat one behind the other.
It was hard to imagine how that was gonna fly (excuse my pun).
No longer the desperately frazzled and worried parent of my past, I took a more Zen approach (or a more slacker one, at least) and decided to plop my kids in the appointed seats. I figured I’d let the chips fall where they may. According to the boarding passes, my three year-old would be sitting beside another adult with a window or aisle seat, and I had a novel optimistically or naïvely placed in my backpack alongside Little Bear and Henry and Mudge. Maybe I’d relax a bit, get a jumpstart on my vacation reading. Who knew?
I mean it’s supposed to take a village to raise a child and all.
The plane was—Saturday of a spring break week and headed to Florida—jam-packed with pasty travelers seeking some redemption in the form of sunshine and citrus. The moment I ushered my daughter toward her seat just behind mine, with my son shuffling into his row just behind hers, the woman destined to sit beside my tot offered to move and then she proceeded to orchestrate the person behind her to do the same. She said, “This mother needs to be with her kids.” All before we even sat down, almost magically—generously, on her part to broker the deal—I was ensconced with my children (as, arguably, I should have been). Score one for the kindness of strangers (who wanted to read their novels or have their naps in relative peace).
What’s more I managed to get a third of the way through the book on the flight because my daughter decided to amuse herself for long stretches of time. While we’re at it, score one for dumb luck.
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Our return flight began the same way: three middle aisle seats in a row on a similarly jam-packed plane (although we were no longer pasty).
This time, though, no one rushed to help us. As I directed the three year-old to her seat, she flipped out. “I want to sit with Remy!” she cried and pushed against the tide of passengers filing onto the plane so that she could sit beside her brother, assigned seat or no she did not care.
She’d taken a man’s aisle seat. His wife was at the window and their teenage son was behind them at the window. The aisle seat behind him—beside my daughter’s now-empty seat—belonged to a man seated just across from his seven year-old daughter, wife in the middle seat and one year-old daughter in a car seat in the window seat. Here’s how the family with teenage son offered to shuffle themselves: into the three seats across from the mom sandwiched between young daughters, usurping that dad’s seat (and his ability to be helpful to his spouse). Seriously?
The plane was pulling out from the terminal, with the dad of young kids now a row ahead and across the aisle from his family and beside my two kids. Right then, we could shuffle no more, nor did he want to be any further from his kids in my seat (nor did his disgruntled co-parent want him at an even greater remove).
Plane in motion toward the runway and my daughter decided she couldn’t stand to be parted from me: she came onto my lap. My seatmate glared at me. Daughter returned to her seat. She whined. She tried to get up again. Dad of two other children helped her with her seatbelt. I craned my neck to smile at her through the crack between the seats. It went like this until we could move about, with the dad taking the middle seat just in front of his family and my sliding into his aisle seat beside both children. For this evening flight after a ten-minute nap, the horribly overtired three year-old acted cranky to prove it (none of the amuse-small-children-while-flying tricks—look out the window, ice cubes in a plastic cup, tiny bags of tiny pretzels—could save us). All the while, the couple and teenage son were chillaxing.
Note to airlines: leaving it to the village is an imperfect plan for seating families with small children.
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Note to readers: Until the end of April I am participating in the National Network of Abortion Funds’ second annual Bowlathon for abortion access. If you’d like to help support this critical cause, you can sponsor my Standing in the Shadows’ team (that’s you, folks, my readers). I’d love it if people bowled or otherwise got together, passed around a bowling ball bag or a hat and raised monies that way—and sent me photos of your gathering.
