Yes, that’s my baby crying on the plane, and I am so sorry

“I see you,” your expression says. “You are that most loathed of all beings: the person who has brought a baby onto an airplane. You are doing this deliberately. You have shown up with an infant because you know there is no worse sound, and you are in your glory as you unleash her upon an unsuspecting public. When you land, you are just going to turn right back around and do it all over again, because this is your idea of a good time.”

Probably your resentment has been building for some time. First you noticed us in the airport, milling around with a baby and what appeared to be roughly 800 bags, all full of various doodads, some of which themselves made annoying sounds. You overheard me referring to myself in the third person as “Mommy,” possibly in a sentence as damning as, “Mommy is loving her Starbucks egg bite!” and you formed a negative impression of me on this basis. I would have, too!

Then you got to see us board the plane ahead of you with our cavalcade of complex, folding, baby-adjacent objects, and then you forgot about us for several blissful minutes, and then you got to your seat and then … there we were. You smiled politely at the baby, but you did so with the cold hand of dread seizing your heart, and you were correct to do so, because the second we became airborne, the baby began crying and she has not stopped since, except for a brief interval to rest her lungs and vary things by emitting a horrible gurgle.

I am so sorry. Yes, that is my baby, and I do not want her to be making this sound, either. I am even closer to her than you are, and she is doing it right into my eardrum.

You are not wrong that this is a bad way to travel. I really wish she were not screaming. Indeed, I wish it even more than you do! I wish I were asleep. Whenever I get onto a plane, I always try my best to fall asleep, because if I am awake, at every slight bump I must resign myself to the inevitability of death. But, as a baby, she is understandably not resigned to the inevitability of death. That, I think, is why she is screaming so loudly: because my attempt to soothe her by invoking the inevitability of death has not worked. Or she has dropped her stuffed zebra somewhere impossible to retrieve, which in its way is kind of worse. Less abstract.

Would it help if I told you the nurses said she had a “musical cry”? No?

Please believe I am trying to get her to stop. I am reasoning with her right now. Understandably this is not going well, because she is, as previously discussed, a baby. I think what I am saying is pretty compelling, though! But she is giving me nothing. Now I am shaking a rattle and making my funniest face. Just three hours to go!

You must understand that this baby has many redeeming qualities. She is a lot of fun at the dinner table. She has the best smile in the world, if you can imagine her smiling. I know it’s difficult to imagine that this baby could ever do anything but scream a horrible scream, but actually she mostly does not scream! Mostly she smiles! Sometimes she naps! She likes to bite things and laugh.

She is a voracious reader, often devouring as many as three books in a morning. We are still trying to get her to read them and not eat them, but we are glad she is excited about them in whatever capacity. She likes to say “aaaaa” and “mama,” sometimes to me, her actual mama, at other times to large inflatable holiday decorations.

Look, if there were a way to get her across the country without flying, I would be doing that instead. I did research other options but they all seemed to involve fording rivers and oxen dying.

In her defense, she does not usually encounter these conditions. Usually, she is at sea level, or just barely above, not hurtling through the sky in a metal tube surrounded by strangers and things that flash and go ding. Then again, she loves strangers and things that flash and go ding (most of her toys do this, even when I thought I had turned them off!), so there is a tiny chance she is not crying right now at all!

Maybe you are not glaring at me, or at my screaming child. Maybe you are doing a Wordle or something, and I am napping, and the baby is gazing out the window with a beatific, peaceful expression on her tiny face. But, just in case, I’m so sorry. Only 2 hours 57 minutes to go!