It was my daughter Kai’s first plane ride. My first flight as a parent. I held her against me with one hand, and with the other, I stuffed her accouterments under the seat. She was four months old, and I was becoming acquainted with all the things I needed to carry. Once her belongings were arranged and secured, I slumped against the seat and let out a breath. We were boarded. The flight was only two hours. The worst was over.
The lady beside us smiled. We exchanged the usual chitchat, though I can’t remember much about it. What I do remember is that before the flight attendants began their safety demonstration, the seatmate leaned over to Kai, linked fingers with her and said: “Pinky promise me that you won’t give your mother any problems on the flight.”
My shoulders tensed. Despite the artfully worded warning, I knew exactly how this lady felt about babies on flights, about sitting beside us, about the possibility that Kai might cry or fuss over the next two hours.
Nearly everybody loves babies. Those chubby cheeks! Those T-Rex arms! We love them, but we prefer for their parents to keep them in designated spaces until they can emerge as considerate middle-schoolers. It’s not a new impulse.
In Luke chapter 18, we see Jesus having an adult conversation. He’s asking those gathered to reconsider everything they know about living a life of faith. “If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself,” Jesus says (Luke 18:14 MSG). While he’s talking, parents are dangling their babies before him, hoping he’ll touch them.
Time has mediated this moment into something charming. In illustrations, Jesus sits with a smiling baby on his lap while his no-fun disciples glower behind him. If parents are included in the painting, they appear reasonable. But the verses in Luke don’t describe children toddling over and clambering into Jesus’s lap. Rather, parents are interrupting a lecture in order for their babies to potentially benefit from Jesus’s magic touch. (Parents and the ill-advised lengths they’ll go for their children, right?)
How does Jesus respond here? He says, “Let these children alone. Don’t get between them and me. These children are the Kingdom’s pride and joy” (18:16 MSG).
I like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase here because pride and joy are two words that describe my feelings about my daughter. Pull up a chair and I can talk about her for hours. But there is a third word in the mix. When we’re out in public, especially when we’re traveling, I’m also anxious. If I explore this emotion, I feel flattened. I realize that I don’t want her existence to inconvenience others.
On our two-hour flight to Phoenix, Kai slept most of the way and she neither fussed, nor cried—though that would not be the case later on a much longer flight to Finland. As passengers stood up around me, my seatmate turned to us once again. “Good job,” she said, and I just wanted to cry, not from relief, but from the unhappy realization that during that two-hour flight, I had been more concerned about a stranger’s comfort than my own baby daughter’s.
In Luke 18, Jesus calls for a radical reconsideration about which spaces are acceptable for babies and children, and by extension, which spaces are acceptable for their parents. I’m not sure what to do with this close reading quite yet. I don’t see this as permission for my child to be awful. That’s not acceptable at home, either, though, of course, we all have our moments. Part of being out and about is for small humans to learn how to be considerate of others. A lesson for adults, as well.
When babies are out in the wider world, we adults have the wonderful opportunity to welcome them and their parents. We can recognize how difficult that first year is and do what we can to make their forays into society a positive, hospitable experience.
Crying baby? No worries. Please, come sit by me.
Sari Fordham teaches creative writing at La Sierra University. She’s super excited about the online literary journal she and her students recently launched, The Roadrunner Review, which can be found at: roadrunner.lasierra.edu.