The lady in the pink shirt...

I admit it, I got cocky. After a calm, collected and crying-free plane ride to New York when Joey was five months old, I thought I was the parent of a wonder child who bravely faced ear-popping altitude changes with a smile. In fact, I even turned to some of my fellow travelers while we were boarding my flight to Oregon and proudly told them not to worry. “Usually babies scream on flights,” I said proudly, “but my boy, well, he’s a wonder baby. He’ll make it through the flight without a peep.”

That said, I know I was asking for it. I should’ve known it was going to be a tough flight when a three-hundred pound man carrying a fast food sack squeezed into the aisle-row seat next to me. He had to lift the armrest to fit into his seat and even so, his body flowed into my seat, leaving me with about 4 inches of usable space between his bulging midsection and my son’s car seat. Still, I wasn’t worried. My baby was cooing happily, playing with the seat-back table and smiling at the passers-by over the top of the seat. Everything was fine.
Everything stayed fine for about three minutes. In the middle of the flight attendant’s spiel about safety, Joey started to whine. Within minutes, his whimpering turned into full-out screaming and by the time we took off, he was arching his back and wailing at the top of his lungs.

The lady in front of my turned around and peeked through the cracks and informed me that “your baby’s ears are probably hurting and you should probably feed him to pop his ears.” Really? I’m just sitting here with my breast exposed to the world while my baby arches his back and refuses to eat for fun. The screeching and thrashing weren’t doing much for my temperament.

Another lady peeked over from behind to tell me that “bottles work much better than breasts on flights, so maybe you should give him a bottle.” Gee! What a great idea. I wish I would’ve thought of that before exposing myself to the male flight attendant, my cheeseburger-eating seatmate and the entire high school baseball team sitting across the row for fun.

“Have you tried rubbing his back and rocking him?” another well-meaning passer-by asked. I glared at her while mumbling something about not having room to move in my half-seat.

Then came the clincher. A teenage girl wearing a purple princess shirt popped her head over the seat in front of me. “Ma’am, your baby’s carseat is making it so that I can’t lean my seat back all the way.” Oh! By all means! Let me drop everything and fix that for you, my dear. It’s not like I’m dealing with anything else right now.

At a loss for what to do, trapped in a tiny seat by a bacon-and-onion cheeseburger and its lip smacking owner, I lost it. With tears streaming down my face, I held Joey to my shoulder, rubbed his back and closed my eyes, letting his screams fill the cabin. He wailed. He squirmed. He wriggled. He sobbed.

I felt a slight tap on my shoulder. A kind woman in a pink shirt was standing in the aisle and she calmly held out her hands. “You must be exhausted. I know exactly how it is on a plane with a baby. Can I give your arms a break for a moment?” At a loss for what to do, I handed Joey over and the kind lady stood in the aisle next to me doing lunges and singing songs to my baby for twenty minutes until he finally calmed down. She put my sleepy baby back into my waiting arms and went back to her seat. I dried my tears and clung Joey close to my heart and said a quick prayer of thanks. Thank God for the angel in the pink shirt… without her, I just might have lost it.