Parents with babies on public transport – an apology
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Version 0 of 1. I’d like to use this space to offer a sincere and formal apology. If this column happens to be read by the parents of any crying babies I’ve ever shared public transport with, I want you to know that I’m sorry. I’m just profoundly sorry. All this time I thought you were doing something wrong. I thought you were bad parents, that your children were essentially feral and that, if you really needed to travel anywhere, you should have just walked. After all, I was trying to read a newspaper, or compose a hilarious tweet about EastEnders, or dumbly gaze out of the window like a cow obliviously trundling towards an abattoir. And that noise your kid was making, whatever that noise was – crying, screaming, gurgling with delight – stood in direct opposition to that. But now here I am, hat in hand, pleading forgiveness. I had no idea what you were going through. And now that I have a baby of my own, I’m quite rightly getting a taste of my own medicine. Last week, we took our son on a train for the very first time. We spent ages beforehand minimising the amount of damage we’d make – abandoning the pram in favour of a baby carrier, cramming all the assembled going-out paraphernalia into tiny satchels, deliberately picking a quiet train, and finding the most obscured seats in case he needed to breastfeed – and hoped against hope that he wouldn’t cry. Reader, he cried. In the big scheme of things, it wasn’t a particularly big cry. Perhaps a level two on the Heritage Junior distress scale; more than a whimper, but much less than the purple-faced apocalypse that he’s occasionally capable of bringing about. And yet even this comparatively muted outburst was enough to immediately send me into spasms of paranoia. I don’t know if other parents get this but, when my son started crying, I swear I could hear every tut, every sigh, every eye-roll happening across the entire train. I could feel the judgment radiating from the other passengers, and the disappointment whenever we didn’t get off at the next stop. It was a level of paranoia that I’ve only felt once before on a train, and that was when I only realised how antisocial it was to drunkenly eat a curry on public transport once I’d almost finished it. Here’s what I’m learning about being the parent of a baby who cries in public: it’s more stressful for us than it is for you. We weren’t always parents, so we know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “God, what terrible parents”, which makes us think “God, everyone thinks we’re terrible parents”, and then we all find ourselves tied up in a never-ending negative feedback loop of crying and judging and clenched-colon embarrassment. You know what else I’m learning? Screw it. Because what can you do? Tape your baby’s mouth shut? Abandon him in a toilet? Take your phone out and rush up and down the carriage, showing everyone photographic proof of a time he behaved? Hardly. Little by little, my son is forcibly kicking the control freak out of me. There’s nothing like having an unreasonable three-month-old strapped to your front to let you know that you can’t always have everything your way. Babies cry. That’s just a thing that happens. The sun rises and sets, babies cry and arseholes will judge you for it. There’s nothing that any of us can do about that. Apart from trying to sit as far as away from the arseholes as possible. And apologising once you realise that you’re being an arsehole. So, again, sorry for that. @stuheritage |