Your Kid is Kicking My Seat

Flying home with my rugrats last week, I put the three of them in the row behind me and claimed the aisle seat directly in front of them like a mother making one last attempt at sanity.

The flight gods, in a rare display of mercy, left the middle seat open. So the woman in the window seat and I got to stretch out a little, which on an airplane basically qualifies as a spa day.

We greeted each other kindly, and I warned her that I would likely be wrangling the unruly squirrels behind me for the duration of the flight.

She laughed and said, “That’s a good word for parenting young kids. Wrangling.”

Exactly.

Not raising. Not guiding. Not teaching emotional intelligence through a Montessori-approved nervous system protocol.

Wrangling. You know, like cattle.

Before we even began taxiing, my youngest (who, of course, was seated directly behind my new flight companion) started wiggling around and kicking the back of her seat.

The woman turned toward me with a kind, slightly nervous smile and said, “Hey, I hate to ask, but would you mind asking your daughter not to kick my seat?”

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “Not at all. Actually, thank you for telling me. It takes a village.”

She looked visibly relieved, which made my brain hurt for civilization.

Because somewhere along the way, we’ve made perfectly normal human requests feel like diplomatic incidents.

A child kicking your seat is annoying.

A stranger asking kindly for it to stop is not a personal attack on your values and morals.

And a parent receiving that request without turning into a mama-bear- meets-guard-dragon should not be considered unusual.

About halfway through the flight, my kids were giggling, tickling each other, and generally having what appeared to be a shockingly pleasant time for being locked inside a sky tube. They weren’t doing anything truly feral. They were just being kids.

I took off my eye mask, nodded at my flight ally, looked back at my happy little herd, and asked what they were doing.

To my surprise, they were not glazed over and hypnotized by screens. They were playing a game they invented called “hide-and-go-Needoh.” There was a sophisticated set of rules and strategies that I won’t get into the details of, but essentially, they were hiding a squishy toy in various locations throughout their row.

Amused, I said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re getting along. Just make sure you keep the hiding spots to the middle and aisle seats, okay?”

They didn’t argue. It was truly magical.

The woman thanked me and said, “I totally get that their prefrontal lobes haven’t formed yet. You’re doing great.”

I laughed, “I mean, if we don’t all work together to teach them social awareness, we end up with more sociopaths in the world, and we really don’t need any more of them in government.”

We both laughed.

The Lost Art of Saying the Damn Thing

The whole thing got me thinking about how unnecessarily awkward these moments have become.

Parents feel disrespected if someone makes a request when their children are not behaving like tiny monks.

Strangers feel paralyzed, afraid that asking for a basic courtesy will be interpreted as judgment, condemnation, or an attack on someone’s entire maternal lineage.

So no one says anything.

Frustration mounts.

Societal norms unravel.

Everyone sits there pretending to be fine while internally composing courtroom-level speeches they will never deliver.

And all those swallowed words, all those tiny unspoken apologies and resentments, do what swallowed things tend to do.

They don’t disappear.

They go underground.

They become Yelp reviews.

They become passive-aggressive Facebook posts.

They cause cardiac arrest.

They become the shadow material of modern life: all the small, honest conversations we refused to have because we were too afraid of being awkward, rude, needy, judgmental, or, gasp, human.

About an hour and a half outside Los Angeles, my youngest accidentally whacked her seat again. The woman peeked through the gap between the seats and winked at her.

My daughter blushed and said, “Oops, I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t mortified.

I was proud.

Look at that. I didn’t even have to sign her up for social skills summer camp. She just had a normal, human moment with another person. She made a mistake, noticed it, apologized, and survived.

A miracle at 30,000 feet.

I asked the woman if I could buy her a glass of wine. A small act of gratitude in the hostile domain of sky jail. She enthusiastically accepted my meager offering.

When the flight attendant brought it over, I cheers’d her shitty plastic cup with my own, smirked, and said, “Hey…thanks for being nice about it.”

Not everything needs to become a culture war or a Reddit sermon.

Not every uncomfortable moment needs to become evidence that society is collapsing, though admittedly, I enjoy that thought spiral as much as the next tired mother.

Sometimes this whole catastrophe of navigating our humanity is pretty simple.

You can boil it down to a woman on a plane saying, “Hey, would you mind asking your kid not to kick my seat?”

And another woman saying, “Oh shit, of course. Thanks for telling me.”

Shadow work doesn’t always look like journal prompts and running barefoot through the forest under a full moon (though I remain open to that). Sometimes it looks like remembering how to speak plainly to one another before the monster of our unspoken frustration turns us all into weird little goblins internalizing imaginary arguments that we release like the Kraken on our significant other when they don’t scoop the litter box.

We don’t have to descend into elaborate fantasy confrontations about what we would have said if that kid kicked the seat one more time.

We can just say the damn thing.

Kindly. Directly. Like adults.

Or at least like adults whose prefrontal lobes are mostly formed.

Anyway. Just be fucking nice. Please.