Of Human Pacifiers and Airport Limbo
Chapter 8 in the Times of Amma Story.
Honest Dispatches From The Trenches of Motherhood
February 2012
Airports used to be my happy place. It’s a place where you exist in a sort of limbo. You have left home, and you haven’t arrived at your destination yet. So, the possibilities are endless. To eat, to nap, to daydream, to people watch.
Of course, all of this was before I ever travelled with a baby.
((For context read chapters 1- 8 here.))
My daughter was 55 days old, and we were at Manila airport. All our bags had been packed, and goodbyes said. We were flying to India via Hong Kong. My in-laws would fly with us till Bangalore, where my parents were based. The day after we arrived would be my baby’s traditional ear piercing ceremony. And then, a day after that, my husband would leave for El Salvador for three months before coming back to take us with him.
So many things charted out. But it all started with my baby’s first flight to her country of origin. Make that two.
Of course, the day that I took my first flight with my infant of 55 days would be the day that the flight was horribly delayed and the air conditioning in the airport broke down. So there we sat post check-in and immigration and security in a hall with a great crowd of travellers stuck in limbo. Flights seemed to be coming and taking off, yet the number of people seated in the waiting hall we were in was unchanging. My baby, however, was unfazed by it all. She was secure in the baby carrier, nursing away and dozing, lulled probably by the murmur of the crowd and the beating of my heart.
By the time we boarded, she was fast asleep. I was sweaty and tired, and all I wanted was to get to India. But by now, we had heard that we wouldn’t be able to catch our flight from Hong Kong. We would know the next step only after we landed.
Now, if, dear reader, you are someone who actually knows me in real life — you would know that I am a planner. I need my daily to-do lists. I need my schedule and plan for the day, the week even. I do things by checking them off one by one, thereby attaining maximum productivity or my version of it. And the version of me in this part of the story was the one who had not really started taking the havoc a child can wreak on an over-planner’s life. This was years before I would learn about unplanned hunger, bathroom, and random overwhelm breaks, thanks to kids. It was before my well-laid plans were torn and scattered into the wind because a child had to get emergency stitches or a child had a fever the moment I planned to go out, and so on. Spontaneity brought me anxiety and not joy! I felt like I had steam building up in my head.
With all this stress about landing late in HK and no idea what to do next, I boarded the airline. It was a full flight, and my in-laws were somewhere in the back. A kind flight attendant came and told me the baby bassinet we had requested would be set up only after take-off and would be taken away just before landing. She would have to be on my lap for take-off and landing. She would need an infant seatbelt at these times. I listened attentively as if all our lives depended on it. I vaguely remember asking her some questions as if I was a student looking to ask intelligent questions to impress the flight attendant.
‘Wow’, she would think, ‘What a well-read and engaged mom!’
Of course, she didn’t care. Neither did the next slightly older attendant, who came over, rolled her eyes at my sleeping infant and loudly demanded that I tighten the infant sleep belt — a small additional loop attached to my belt to keep her as secure as possible.
“But she is fast asleep and only 55 days old. The buckle is cold and will be too heavy for her. She might wake up and cry.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at me — “If she cries, she cries. But you have to tighten the belt, Ma’am. That is the airline’s policy. It’s a safety issue, and you, as a mother, shouldn’t be asking why.”
Though there was some point in her words, the tone was harsh. Exhausted as I was, I could feel tears made of rage, shame, and sadness prick my eyelids. I swallowed it and tightened the loop, making my daughter squirm and wake up. The moment the woman walked away, I slipped my fingers between the buckle and my daughter’s tiny body. If I could personally reduce her discomfort, I would. It was a new feeling to want to fully transform into a human shield absorbing every scratch, virus, and bump for someone else.
After disembarking in Hong Kong, we merged into a long, serpentine immigration queue. What was supposed to be a quick transfer in Hong Kong turned out to be a 24-hour layover that thankfully included a hotel room- courtesy of the airline. The only catch? We had to go through immigration on the way in and out. Our daughter was fitful in the sling. Strangers came too close and peered at us. A phenomenon that we’d been amused by when we experienced it while travelling in Beijing way before we had her. But now, with our baby in tow, it was intrusive and annoying. Somehow, we managed to make it to the front of the line and at 55 days old, my daughter got her first-ever stamp in her passport. It was a good omen of the travel she had in front of her.
The layover turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Fortified by a good night’s sleep in a comfortable hotel bed and an extensive buffet breakfast, we were ready for our second flight to Bengaluru, where my parents were waiting to be reunited with their granddaughter with bated breath.
The second flight was uneventful, and the arrival at Bengaluru or Bangalore, as my lizard brain still calls it, is a blur. I had just survived my first two flights as a new mother as a human pacifier. People often worry about their baby’s first aeroplane ride, and rightly so. It is not a natural situation for humans, let alone infants, to be able to take to the skies. Since the 1950s, when air travel started becoming more accessible, many a babe has travelled on an aeroplane. Most of us who have ever taken a flight have been on a plane with a baby. Sometimes, we know they are there. Sometimes, we hear them throughout the flight. The odds are that it’s not always pleasant to have a baby on board with you. But thanks to the internet and years of collected human wisdom, we actually have a lot of hacks to help the baby’s flight a lot more comfortable and, by extension, its co-passengers. We already know about feeding or using a pacifier at landing or take-off. We know about the white noise of the plane being soothing. We know about the powers of baby-wearing in airports. A lot of blogs and a lot of info.
What we do need, though, is information on how to keep the primary parent, in the majority of cases, the Mom from collapsing after her baby’s first flight. Here she is with her tiny infant — already stressed about the germs, viruses and whatnot, plus the airport with the never-cleaned baby diaper changing area, the ones where the dad’s bathrooms still haven’t been updated to include a changing area. The yelling security officers, the substandard food, all the while the stress of having to nurse in public because you have not reached that stage of your journey where you breastfeed in abandon with all hanging out because — grow up, it’s just breasts! And then you are on the aeroplane where every passenger either makes eye contact with you with a dead stare because they hate that you are the person bringing this potential shrieking hazard on board, or they look away from you pointedly as if — your baby, your mess! And then somehow you make it through your flights as a human pacifier, your body a baby bed, your elbow frozen because you don’t want to move and wake your baby up. Your bladder is about to burst because you didn’t let go of your baby for a second because you are a control freak. And now, on landing, everyone asks about the baby, and no one asks if you are okay. So you stand dazed, baby still in your arms, smelling of sweat and sour milk, wondering what the aching feeling was and not really understanding that it is the beginning of a sort of loneliness you feel even in a crowd that many, many new mothers experience.
We passed through immigration, collected our bags, and I stumbled into the arms of my waiting parents. The only thing I clearly remember is the tears of joy glinting in my parents’ eyes as we walked out of the airport.
It was surreal to return to India, to Bangalore, as a mom with a baby in my arms. I had so many memories in the city. I’d visited as a school student, been here on competitions. This is where I moved to from Delhi — moving from the desk to in front of the camera as a TV news reporter. This was where I quit TV news to join the nonprofit sector. This is where I met my husband for the first time. And now here I was, starting a new chapter in my life with a baby in my arms, and Bangalore would be the setting for the first months of it.
It was past midnight, and we had landed on my husband’s birthday. We sped home. My grandmother was staying with us at the time. It was too late to wake her up, but my husband’s sister had come over from Chennai to meet her niece. She looked at our baby and her brother repeatedly and in disbelief at times. How was it that her older brother — the one who had tormented her in childhood and stood by her as they grew up, now a dad. It was fascinating to see her reaction to our daughter.
At some point late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, we all went to bed. But no before some birthday cake.
The next day was important — it would mark a milestone in our child’s life, the day her ears would be pierced.
To be continued…
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This is me documenting my early motherhood journey before it gets hazier and hazier. If you can connect, relate, or like what you just read, please feel free to hit me up on Instagram.
