Does That Macaque Have Frequent Flyer Miles?

The other day I read an article in the New York Times about a new study of male Barbary macaques. Seems these guys love to care for babies — grab ‘em from their mothers and haul them around to male pow wows. Doesn’t matter if it’s their own baby; any infant will do. When the youngster has to eat, the male caretaker reluctantly returns it to mom, but maintains a tight grip on the baby’s ankle lest someone steal it away — say, its mom.

This article amused me for many reasons, but primarily because the recent research has upended the prior hypothesis that male macaques become baby-snatchers in order to prove their power.  You know, the old, “I’m in charge so I can steal any old baby I want” approach.

Turns out, according to the new study, what the male macaques are really trying to prove by taking care of a baby is that they can handle stress.

This made a lot of sense to me.  Until a few days later, when it occurred to me that male macaques know nothing about stress because they’ve never taken one of their babies on a five-hour flight only to have the baby emphatically decide halfway through that  it is time to leave.

In a way, I blame the new pediatrician.

We saw her the day before our flight, for Lily’s fifteen-month check-up.  Lily showed off by pulling her clothes out of the diaper bag for the doctor and then holding up and identifying her shoe:  “Shooh.”  Then she sat obligingly on my lap while the doctor peered into her eyes, pressed a stethoscope to her chest, and — with a little turn upside down to aid in the process — opened her mouth just wide enough to give the doctor a peek at her throat.

“Wow, she’s very calm,” the doctor observed as I puffed up with pride.  “Most fifteen-month-olds hate the lack of control during the examination.  It’s one of the hazards of my job,” she continued with a smile that let me know she loved her job, bossy fifteen-month-olds and all.

Ah, lack of control.  I should have known better than to believe it when I heard Lily characterized as someone who doesn’t mind it.  In fact, I did know better.  Especially twenty-four hours later.

We did it all right pre-flight.  I took the kids to the park on one of those days that is so hot you worry about sending the baby down the slide on her tummy for fear of third-degree burns.  We wandered around and swung and watched from the shade of some trees as big kids tossed a football over the high fences surrounding the baseball diamond.  By the time Dad arrived to pick us up, car loaded for the airport, we were all feeling kind of tired.

The thing is, the airport in this case was the Charlotte Airport, a good two-and-a-half hours away.  Which gave me and Lily plenty of time for napping and Jake just a little head start on a marathon of DVD-watching.  My point being that Lily awoke as we pulled up to the curb refreshed and ready for action.

Not that she didn’t get plenty of it in the ample two hours we allotted for Mike to park the car and for us to get two kids, a double stroller, and an impressive bag of food and milk through security.  This included the process of opening each cup of milk — tossing drops of it over the table in the process — holding it up for the TSA guy to point some kind of test gun at, putting the tops back on, and apologizing to him for the mess.

Then we got to spend some unscheduled quality time yelling about our seats.  The ones that we had reserved four across — me and two kids in the row of three with Dad right across the aisle for backup and support.  The very same ones that the airline — hey, let’s not pull our punches; it was US Airways — saw fit to break up by giving the aisle seat next to the kids to someone they liked better than us and sending me to a middle seat two rows up.

Let me draw the picture more clearly:  According to US Airways, it was perfectly acceptable for my fifteen-month-old and my three-and-a-half-year-old to occupy a window and middle seat next to a stranger while their father sat across the aisle and I squeezed between two people who were not my children in a different row.  (Mike insisted that I take the aisle near the kids — surely the person next to them would jump at the chance to switch with me — and he squeeze all six feet five inches of himself into a middle seat.  I insisted that this would result in blood clots.  He countered that blood clots would be far preferable to trying to deal with Lily when I was nowhere to be seen.)

Mike tried to explain the problem first at check-in.  The counter attendant was unimpressed with our woe and blamed us for buying our tickets through a third-party vendor.  In other words, cheap, as if it was our fault for doing so.

At the gate, we loaded me up with the baby for sympathy and sent me to the gate agent to see if  I could make some headway.

“You purchased tickets from a third-party vendor,” she said unsympathetically, apparently never having traveled with small children herself.

At least she offered a somewhat better configuration to aim for, whereby I could trade  my middle seat so Lily and I sat window and middle while, separated by an unfortunate stranger, Mike and Jake hung out across the aisle.

This was in fact how we ended up traveling.  At first it didn’t seem so bad, especially since Mike still had time before the flight for a beer and half an hour watching the World Cup while I walked Lily in circles around the gate area trying to tire her out and Jake crashed into things that I tried to make sure were not people.

In fact, Lily was being pretty charming when a nice man with two kids of his own sat in the aisle and promised not to become too annoyed when Mike and I passed things back and forth over him.  We, in turn, agreed to keep the passing to a minimum.

And then Lily got tested.  There was the delayed departure.  The idling on the runway to make way for a plane that had the audacity to land with an emergency signal, hence cutting dangerously into the time I could expect Lily to be satisfied sitting in my lap looking at Spot Goes to the Farm.  And, finally, there was the storm we had to steer around after we finally took off, keeping the fasten seatbelts sign lit until Lily had been sitting in my lap more or less patiently for nearly two hours and I had run through all our books, the Etch-a-Sketch I bought just for the trip, part of a Sesame Street DVD, every kind of snack we had with us, and the duty free catalog.

Once freed from our seats, the first walk in the aisle went well.  Lily smiled at people.  I got a chance to use the bathroom.  She found it only mildly annoying when I smushed her into the limited space over her father every time the drink cart passed by.

But when we sat down again she got a bit antsy.

I used all my charm.  All my parenting skills.  All my goodwill with the man next to me who assured me a few squawks from my child barely penetrated his wise use of headphones and an MP3 player.  But once Lily was done saying, “Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!” to the women ignoring her behind us I had no choice but to go for another walk.

“Bye, bye!  Bye, bye!” Lily was chanting manically.  I had a feeling I knew what she really meant, but chose to believe she just wanted to get out of her seat for a bit.

So we made our way down the aisle, Lily grinning with pleasure the whole short way.

When we reached the flimsy curtain separating us from the space that is business class, I turned her around.  This is where things got a tad ugly.

“No,” she said, merely firmly at first.  “No!” more forcefully when she felt that I wasn’t understanding her.

I was understanding her just fine.  Lily had decided it was time to leave somewhere in the air over Kansas and was mighty disappointed in me for failing to accommodate her wishes.

“We can’t leave, honey,” I said, as much for the benefit of the passengers glancing up whenever Lily let out a particularly cutting yell as for her.

“Dada,” she demanded, brokering herself a deal.

Over the man on the aisle who was probably thinking longingly of his own two well behaved kids we clambered.

It worked out great for a minute or two until Lily started twisting her body with growing anger.  “Bye bye!” she insisted.  “Bye BYE!”

Figuring it was worse to have her yelling in the middle of the aisle than hunkered down in the window seat over the wing, I apologetically made my way back over the unfortunate man in the middle of all this.  He offered to let me sit on the aisle but at this point, I promised him, Lily was on her way to sleep.

“On her way to sleep,” as any parent — including the patient man — knows, has a rather broad meaning.  Lily screamed and bucked.  I put her on the floor and tried to form a sound barrier with my body.  She howled at me.  Even though I knew just how she felt — having decided that I HAVE TO GET OFF THE PLANE RIGHT THIS MOMENT plenty of times myself though somewhat better at controlling the need — I threw a blanket over her head as if this act of vandalism would somehow make her fall asleep more easily instead of getting her REALLY angry.

As her howls increased in volume I was brought vividly back to all those flights I took before I had kids when the mere sight of anyone under eighteen years of age sitting in the five rows around me would set off a grumble in my throat and put a scowl on my face.  Lily, I decided as she tried to push my hands away and make a loud run for it, was far, far worse than anything I had ever experienced to make me so surly about flying with kids.  Far.

“You have to stop,” I muttered desperately more than once when Lily pruned her face into a little red scowl of agony and increased the volume.

“Dada, Dada, Dada,” she responded desperately as I considered whether this might be the end of her extended Mommy’s Girl phase.

I considered the Dada option but knew that it would require me climbing over the man whose remaining drops of goodwill surely couldn’t last me the rest of the flight as it was.  Plus, I was pretty sure that in Lily’s mind Dada was only a pit stop on the way to getting the hell off this airplane.

I gave considerably more consideration to buying some Baby Benedryl before our return flight and drugging my child so I wouldn’t have to do a second round in Dante’s Inferno.

As I struggled with the yogic implications of deliberately and unnecessarily drugging my child — and understood perfectly why people do it, so no judgment here — Lily slumped over the hand that was holding her back from her quest for escape from her seat on the floor at my feet.  She let out a few whimpers and went slack.

Every cuddly maternal instinct drained from my system, I let her sit there for five or ten more minutes when I continue to hone my Baby Benadryl plan.

Finally, with something over an hour to go in our flight, I settled my sleeping girl in my lap.  Amazing how sweet and angelic she looked cuddled against me.  How I couldn’t help kissing her soft forehead even though I could feel the man next to me looking on with what surely had to be disbelief.  Or maybe just relief that his kids had never acted like this on an airplane.

“What can you do?” I said hopelessly to him, aiming for camaraderie and assurance.

“It’s hard,” he said with a smile that suggested that, whatever he does for a living, it involves smiling a lot when he doesn’t really mean it.

Mike tells me that my sound-muffling attempts didn’t help much and that in baggage claim we were the subject of those “I had a screaming baby on the flight” horror stories.  Which dimmed my only sense of accomplishment, even when he told me I shouldn’t care what anyone else thinks. I suppose he’s right and that some of them will some day be in the same position and will regret thinking such mean thoughts about me, but this offers me scant comfort.

And what about Jake?  Mike tells me he occasionally looked up from his DVD’s and stated in a measured tone, “I want to get off the plane now.”  But when Mike told him that wasn’t possible, he was perfectly willing to put in a another episode of those blessed Backyardigans.

In fact, when he came bounding over to me as we were — hallelujah — on the ground and waiting for the doors to open, I thought it was to express to me how pleased he was with himself for being so darned easy.

Actually, it was a bit more urgent than that.

“I have to pee,” he announced in a voice that let me know this was not an idle statement.

I looked to the front of the plane where everyone was standing and no one was moving.  “Can you hold it?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” Jake promised.  Then, with mounting panic, “It’s coming!”

This is the point at which I knew for a fact that male macaques can not begin to compete with me.  For, faced with the prospect of my son peeing on the foot of the man who had already endured so much, I proved that stress cannot compete with motherhood.

Barely forming the thought before I acted, I whipped out Lily’s empty Dora the Explorer cup and unscrewed the top.  The nice man next to us tactfully looked away as Jake filled it up nearly to the rim.

“Daddy, guess what I did!” he cried happily for all to hear as I carefully screwed the top on the cup of pee.

He promised he understood that peeing in a Dora cup is something we do only in emergencies  when I had to locate a second empty cup as we waited in baggage claim for his father to get the rental car.  This time I was a bit more worried about airport security arresting us for exposure or loitering or just plain being gross in a way that only parents can understand.  But he hasn’t asked to pee in a cup since so I think we’ve made it through.

As for making it through Lily’s aversion to being stuck on an airplane for five hours?  I’m pretty darned sure she’s not over that.  And while I haven’t called the pediatrician to get the correct dose of Baby Benadryl yet, we’ve got a few more days to go before the return flight.

Try Some Ujjayi Breathing

It occurs to me that in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been writing YogaMamaMe I’ve yet to properly explain ujjayi breathing.  This is the calming breath we use during an asana practice — the soothing sound we make to assure our jumping nerves that we really can hold this pose for a bit longer.

But since I’m feeling pretty grateful for all that stress-control practice I’ve had with something as simple as holding utkatasana while my quads burn and quake, it’s worth noting that a few good ujjayi breaths can help calm you in the real stresses of everyday life as well.

Or you can just think about me on the airplane with my screaming child and realize that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t nearly as terrible as you thought.

Instructions for Ujjayi Pranayama