In retrospect, yesterday evening wasn’t all that much worse than usual. When I came to pick Sasha up from daycare, she was reluctant, lying down in the middle of the classroom until the teacher dragged her to me. Then she didn’t want to be in her stroller, and she didn’t like the snack I gave her on the way home. She moaned and whined in the subway. Finally, half a block from home, I let her loose from the stroller, and she immediately started going into other people’s houses, and when I dragged her away, she decided to start crawling along the sidewalk, picking up cigarette butts and bottlecaps. When, at last, I got her into the apartment, I realized she’d pooped—and yet she writhed and struggled on the changing table, unwilling to let me clean her up.
I may have shouted. I wanted to smack her. I wanted to be anywhere but there, dealing with this horrendous child. For a second or two, I regretted her existence.
But then I thought about a line from the weekend’s Washington Post story about the clash between parents and non-parents in our nation’s capital. A brief section of the article deals with strollers on buses, and the reaction to an anti-stroller incident on a local blog:
Tensions only escalated after Archer and other parents explained that folding a stroller can be difficult when lugging groceries. “People should think about how they’re going to get their food once they have a child before they have a child,” replied a commenter identified as Teo. “Maybe have your neighbor watch your kid for an hour or two. . . . Maybe move closer to a store so you can walk. . . . Maybe don’t have kids.”
This argument, I should say, drives me nuts. More nuts than Sasha’s malingering, even. Because contrary to what Teo and his ilk claim, many of us do think about these things before the kids arrive—we obsess over them, and keep obsessing over them.
We do things like, say, move to a different apartment in a better neighborhood so we won’t be spending all our time complaining about living on the sixth floor in a crappy area. We stand to the side when everyone else goes up the stairs in the subway because carrying a stroller up in a crowd is miserable for everyone. Yes, some parents are entitled and oblivious, but many of us aren’t—but that doesn’t mean you won’t sometimes get bumped on the F train or have to hear my kid whine for a few minutes before we get off. Still, because I obsess over these things, I always imagine it’ll be my transgression that’ll start the shitstorm.
Anyway, as Sasha continued to struggle, I imagined that commenter, Teo, standing at my side, saying, “If you can’t deal with this, maybe you should’ve thought about that before you had kids.” And then, instead of punching my imaginary enemy in the face, I just remembered that, like so much of the Internet, he doesn’t really exist. And Sasha calmed down, I gave her a bath, her mother came home, and another evening ended.
