Baby on Board

“Oh my God, Shut up! Shut up! Enough!”

“Sir, I really don’t think that that is appropriate to say to my chil-“
“I’ve had enough! Oh my god, all the way!”

“Stop telling my child to shut up!”

“Stop telling me to shut up, and tell your child to shut up! You bloody stupid!”

Today, this was not a conversation I was merely eavesdropping on. It was not a conversation from a stranger. It was initiated by my father, who was infuriated with the constant loud crying of the chubby infant behind him on the flight back to Melbourne.

I had only thirty minutes of sleep, and the entire time that I was kept awake by the discomfort of the hotel bed and my mother’s snoring, I heard my father pacing the kitchen and living room, unable to sleep as well. The sleep that I acquired is barely what my father acquired too, so it is safe to say that we were quite on edge. The flight from Melbourne to Queensland bared the same crying infant, though he was perched beside someone in the start of the plane, and my father, seated with us at the back, said, “I feel sorry for whoever is sitting next to him.” The irony that the infant sat right behind my father was too much to cope in the duration of the flight.

Two whole hours – my mother had modeled a ship out of the vomit bag provided to her for the flight, to give to the infant in order to calm him down, however I told her that I would rather not see her breakfast than see it sprawled all over the innocent passenger sitting in front of her. She unfolded it, and returned it to her spot. The infant kept crying. Its mother did nothing in those entire two hours to soothe him, nor did the father. There were around five other infants on board, and their parents kept them quiet and entertained with ‘whooshing’ and other noises that planes make, and gestures. Unluckily for this baby, though, its parents begged to differ, and my father’s patience was running thinner.

And so, the burst of conversation above happened. Every passenger turned in our direction and tried to contain their laughter. My sister, mother and I certainly could not. My father was seated next to two good-looking young men, too, who he most likely had deafened in the miniature dispute. The flight attendants dared not comment, they simply hurried past, doing their jobs of checking the chairs and passenger bagging faster, to avoid an imaginary explosion of my father’s insides from pure anger.

The funniest thing about this entire ordeal was not the flight attendant’s reaction, nor mine nor my mother nor my sister’s nor anyone else on the plane, but the fact that the infant, after being screamed at to “shut up” actually had. In fact, after my dad had shook the plane with his voice more than turbulence, the infant had sat there with its eyes widened and mouth sealed shut. A Japanese man wearing white headphones seated across from me could not stop giggling to himself. Surely, my father had done what everyone else on the plane wished they had. It was an 8am flight, and nobody had time for a constantly wailing infant in the midst of turbulence.

The infant’s father, I predicted, was soon to fight with my father after the plane had landed. When it did, however, and my father stood from his seat, he overshadowed the infant’s father by height and by weight and by anger, so the infant’s father slumped back down in his chair slowly and acted as though the incident never occurred in the first place. In fact, I could have sworn he would have given his infant as a sacrificial meal to my infuriated father, had he been any bigger than he is.

That moment in time was certainly entertaining for me and all the plane passengers, except for that infant. Why is it that infants are allowed on flights? I only dared for less than a few seconds to imagine this situation on a flight that went for over twelve hours – in that event, I presume that my father would have catapulted the infant, its mother and father out of the entire plane with one breath.