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Sunday, May 07, 2006

When You Become the Obstacle

Days are pockmarked with tiny rudenesses and petty humiliations for everyone, but parental behavior in restaurants can be astonishing.

Years ago, before my kid was the proverbial twinkle, I used to go to an Italian restaurant near the Film Forum with some frequency. It was tasty, they fed you fast if you needed to catch a movie, and they often had tasty seasonal items, like punterella, which I completely fell in love with and developed cravings for in the off-season (it's an Autumn thing).

But one day, while eating, a family got up and changed their baby on the table, hoisting the little kid in the air to dry off its bottom and ended the performance by leaving the discarded diaper ball on the table for the waitstaff to clear along with the plates.

My disgust persists even after having a baby. In fact it's grown and blossomed. Those folks give people with shame a bad name.

But that's surely an unusual moment, a tiny bit of extreme awfulness from a rare breed of nightmare parents.

But there are other smaller kinds of entitlement and unpleasantness that contribute to the not-insignificant list of reasons Why People Hate Parents and Babies.

This afternoon, in the company of my baby, a four-year-old, a 5-week-old and three other adults, I tried to find seats in a not-particularly-full restaurant. A woman and her husband had liberally spread their belongings around, stroller, bag on a chair that went with a table adjoining their own, that sort of thing. The woman was breastfeeding.

So I asked her in gentle tones, my own kid on my hip, if the bag was hers and if we could use the table. She snarled at me that she was breastfeeding and couldn't do much about it. (Though, interestingly, she was able to use her free hand to eat. Perhaps she had that post-partum carpal tunnel syndrome that makes lifting a bag impossible but forks are not troublesome.) Her partner sighed and said he would move the bag, and started to get up when some other people spotted what was going on and generously moved for us.

Thank God, because who would want to sit next to her anyway?

Now, obviously, I am sympathetic to breastfeeding in public, so that isn't the point. The problem is entitlement. This woman felt that because she was breastfeeding she could take up as much of the restaurant as she wanted and be genuinely angry if someone else, someone who clearly also had a child, would ask her to be a little accommodating.

So while my misanthropy is growing like a weed this spring, I also wonder about this behavior. Does it come about because people are parents or was it always there and being parents just provides so many opportunities for people show off how unpleasant they are. It is baffling, since ideally one would want one's child to participate in the world, and not pretend the world was either there only to serve or be an inconvenience. For my part, I my shame has increased exponentially post-kid, but anyone who knows me probably could have seen that coming.

As much as I love him, no one's meal would be improved by a gander at my child naked and angry about being changed, let alone the revolting hygiene questions that- I won't even begin to begin.

posted by Elise at 1:58 PM

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7 Comments:

Rachel said...

I think some people feel entitled and then become parents. Once they are parents the attitude contines. Parenthood is an independent variable.