Fly, Baby, Fly!

Let me start by assuring you that this is not a rant about babies crying on airplanes⎯to most flight attendants, a fussing baby is far less annoying than a fussing Premier, and I’ve told more than one whiny frequent flier as much to his face. And I don’t think that just because you have a baby it means you shouldn’t be allowed on an airplane until the kid’s 8. Everyone back home in Kansas City or wherever is dying to see your kids, I understand. Heck, I did it myself when I helped my friend bring her 1-year-old son home from Guatemala, and I wouldn’t even know my niece and nephews if my sister didn’t fly with toddlers with some frequency. Well before my sister and my friends even started having kids, I had a dad approach me in the galley and make a point of thanking me for being, as he put it, “family friendly.” I just told him You’re Welcome, as if I had forced a bunch of passengers through hoops to get him and his kids seated together because I gave a shit, and not because the dad was meathead-football-player hot and I was pretty sure I could take the wife. I tell this story not to belabor the point that I spend much of my work day wandering the aisles winking at the cute guys, but rather to establish my credentials as someone who is, at the end of the day, pro-baby.

But really, why do so many knuckleheads travel with small children? OK, some are actual crazy people, such as the woman who shrieked “WHERE’S MY BABY?!?” every time her baby was removed from her direct sight line (when her husband set the car seat down, when he turned his back on her to change the baby, when she her damn self looked away, etc.). And some people mean well but clearly aren’t participating members of the parenting team, such as the middle-aged dad who boarded the airplane a while back by himself with a suitcase, a car seat, and a baby who might have been six months old. He clearly had his hands full, so I stepped up and offered to help. “Can I help you get the car seat situated?” I asked. “Oh, no thanks.” he told me. “I’ve got it covered.” And then he stood there. And stood there. And stood there. Doing nothing but holding the baby. He was in First class on a 757, so he wasn’t clogging up the boarding process, as coach typically boards behind the First class cabin, but I did begin to wonder how he expected the car seat to magically install itself. And then the answer, blonde and about fifteen years younger, presented itself; what he meant by “I’ve got it covered,” apparently, was that he had a wife, and that she would have it covered when she arrived. He saw my jaw drop, and had the sense to act sheepish. He said to his wife, “Maybe I should watch you do that,” and I walked right up to her and said “See that he does, cuz he told me he ‘had it covered.’” Without even pausing in her work, she looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

Like everything else on the airplane, it’s usually about a sense of entitlement. You see these young moms get on the airplane in places like Oakland and Eugene, Oregon, nineteen years old in a pink Baby Phat sweat suit or the black concert t-shirt of a country star or heavy metal band. Pregnant and juggling a toddler and a baby, she’s got one collapsible umbrella stroller and one diaper bag, so loaded with Cheerios and coloring books and bottles and diapers that she looks like H.I. McDunnough robbed a convenience store for her on the way to the airport. She’s always squeezed into the last row with the baby on her lap, and you don’t hear a peep out of any of the three of them until she says Goodbye and Thank You at the end of the trip. Compared to the forty-something millionaire parents who get on the airplane in San Francisco and Orange County. Parents who don’t know how to collapse the $1300 stroller with cup holders and overhead bins and a GPS on it because the Nanny usually does it, and who sit in the first row of First class as if they are waiting for the other passengers to come up and congratulate them for putting a sperm and an egg together and coming up with a kid. One who spends much of the flight squawking away on the floor or jumping up and down on the seat, it has to be said, while mom and dad stare at it and rue leaving the nanny at home, ringing the call light every two minutes, meanwhile, as if they hadn’t.

A mom came to the back of an Airbus a while back, we were going from Chicago to San Francisco, which can take about four hours. She opens with, “Now before you say anything, I want you to know, I brought four diapers for this flight, and he had a fresh one on when we got on the plane.” So of course the little slugger is beset this particular afternoon with the worst case of explosive diarrhea of his young career, and she’s out of diapers with two hours to go. I took the time to look in the stew kit, cuz we sometimes end up with an international kit even on a domestic flight, and those do sometimes have diapers in them, but I found nothing. Mostly joking, I held up a small stack of the narrow white paper strips we use to line the top of the beverage cart and told her, “We call these diapers.” She thought on it for a second, and when I could see she was considering it, I added, “and we have plastic bags…” And so he toddled off the airplane when we arrived in San Francisco, his little butt wrapped in paper, his little legs sticking through the holes torn in the trash bag, the yellow drawstring pulled tight. Mom had tried to plan, and so I tried to help her.

Unlike this jackass: I was working aft (economy) purser on a 747 from London to San Francisco, which mostly entails a huge amount of galley set-up, without which your service is doomed to fail (not to mention take four hours, which cramps everybody’s crew rest style). So we’re still at the gate, we’re boarding, and I’m frantically cracking ice and setting up coffee makers and scrounging tonic waters (the G&Ts were free to London in those days and we served more of those than we did glasses of water) and this dad keeps coming back to my galley asking for stuff. First he wants food for the baby, which they had ordered and I did have, so I gave it to him. Then he comes back wanting something in the way of baby entertainment. So part of me is like Really? For a twelve-hour flight you couldn’t stick a ring of plastic keys in your bag? And another part of me is kind of like Dude, there are like five other flight attendants back here, could you ask one who isn’t looking frazzled and wielding a plastic hammer? So I give him a stack of plastic cups, like here, babies can’t get enough of these. So now I’ve established myself as Mister Resourceful, right? So he comes to the back again⎯we’re still at the gate, mind you, about to set out on a twelve-hour transatlantic flight⎯and asks me for a diaper. I’m like, Really? So he finally gets his wish, I stop what I’m doing and, still holding the ice mallet, I turn to face him and I ask him, “Did you have this baby with you when you left the house this morning?” He’s like, Excuse me?, so I elaborate. “Because if you picked this baby up on the side of the road, I will help you figure something out. But if you really came to the airport for a twelve-hour flight without even a diaper, you’re on your own.”

I never heard from him again, maybe it was the hammer, but come on. You might wish you were taking a vacation from being a parent, but when the kid’s with you, you’re not; you can’t! If you plan ahead and board the airplane prepared at a minimum for normal circumstances (nobody is going to hold you responsible for a six-hour weather delay or a mechanical diversion), you’ll at least get some sympathy from your flight attendants, and probably a helping hand with the diaper bag, but you should be warned that we don’t have much else to offer you. You can order baby food in advance of most international flights, but not on a domestic flight. We don’t have diapers, we don’t have crayons⎯we used to have all that stuff, but not anymore. And it’s not because flight attendants are lazy or out to get you, and it’s not because we don’t care. But executive bonuses are expensive and the CEO’s driver won’t work for free: that money has to come from somewhere, and if you don’t bring it, you ain’t getting it until we get where we’re going, and that means food and entertainment for yourself as much as for your kids. I hang out with moms⎯I know you don’t go to the Children’s Museum or even to the dang Target with your kids without preparing for every possible contingency. Do the same when you fly⎯I’ll get you an apple juice if we don’t run out before we get to your row⎯and the only person we’ll need to worry about crying on the flight will be the Big Shot in First who doesn’t get his meal choice.