A Passenger Told Me to Hide in the Bathroom While I Fed My Baby …

My husband died on a Tuesday in March.

He had been sick for eleven months, and we had known for most of those eleven months what the end was going to be, which is the specific cruelty of a long illness, the way it gives you time to prepare and then, when the end arrives anyway, shows you that preparation was never the thing you needed.

His name was David.

He was thirty-four years old.

He was the kind of father who had learned to braid hair from a YouTube video because Louise’s hair was long and he wanted to be able to do it himself on the mornings when I was at work early, who had sat in a hospital room for twenty-two hours while I labored with Eli because he had decided that being present was the whole job, who had, in the months before his diagnosis, started writing letters to his children.

One for each birthday.

Through to Louise’s eighteenth.

Through to Eli’s eighteenth.

Letters he would not be there to say in person, written in the specific careful language of a man who understood that the people he was writing to would be different versions of themselves by the time they read each one, who tried to write to those future versions rather than the children he currently knew.

I found them after he died, in a shoebox in the back of the closet, organized by name and date, each one sealed.

I did not open any of them.

They were not for me.

I put them in the fireproof box where I kept the important documents and I called my mother.

She was in Phoenix, three states away, where she had retired two years ago to the warmth that her joints demanded and the grandchildren proximity she said was optional but was not.

She answered on the first ring.

She said: Rachel.

I said: Mom.

She said: I know.

She said: I’m coming.

She came.

She stayed for two weeks.

She washed things and organized things and made food and drove Louise to school and held Eli when I could not hold anyone, the specific help of a mother who understands that what grief requires is not comfort exactly but the removal of friction, the reduction of the tasks that still have to happen even when you cannot imagine how they will.

When she left, she said: come to Phoenix.

I said: I can’t travel with a five-month-old.

She said: you can. People do.

She said: you don’t have to do this alone in that house.

The house.

The house where David had died in our bedroom, in the bed we had shared, in the room where Eli’s bassinet was still beside the window because we had moved it there in January when we understood that the time remaining was shorter than we had hoped.

I said: let me think about it.

I thought about it for three weeks.

Louise was the one who helped me decide.

She was eight years old and she was the specific kind of eight-year-old that her father had been building toward, the one who paid attention and who made observations and who asked questions that were more precise than the questions most eight-year-olds asked.

She had loved her father with the complete love of a child, and she had watched him die over eleven months with the specific awareness of a child who is old enough to understand what is happening and too young to have the architecture of grief that adults have built over years.

She was managing it.

That is the word.

She was managing.

In the way that children manage things when they do not have enough language for the size of what they are feeling, she was quiet and careful and present in a way that was more adult than eight-year-olds should have to be.

One morning she came downstairs and sat across from me at the breakfast table.

She said: we should go to Grandma’s.

I said: what made you think of that?

She said: because here is where Daddy isn’t. But Grandma’s is just Grandma’s.

I looked at my daughter.

I said: yes. You’re right.

She said: can we go?

I said: yes. We can go.

I called my mother.

She said: I’ll buy the tickets.

I said: I’ll buy them.

She said: Rachel.

I said: Mom. Please let me buy the tickets.

She said: all right.

I bought three tickets.

An aisle seat for myself and Eli, who at five months was a lap infant under FAA regulations.

The middle seat in the same row, which I bought and left empty so that neither Louise on my left nor the window passenger on my right would be too crowded with a nursing infant in the row.

And the window seat in the row directly behind, which was where Louise would sit.

The airline had a families-seated-together policy and I called them and explained and they confirmed that the seats were adjacent rows and that Louise would be within arm’s reach.

I thought this would be enough.

I thought about a lot of things that turned out not to be enough.

The morning of the flight, Louise helped me pack the diaper bag with the specific organizational care she had learned from watching her father pack things, who had always said that a well-packed bag meant you could find what you needed without looking, which required thinking through the order of likely needs before packing rather than after.

She put the diapers in the outer pocket.

She put the wipes in the inner pocket.

She put the extra onesie and the extra shirt for me in the middle compartment because she had seen Eli spit up on me enough times to know the shirt was necessary.

She put her tablet in her own small backpack, along with the book she was reading and the headphones she wore when the sounds around her became too much.

Eli was asleep when we got to the airport.

He was often asleep at this hour, the specific sleep of a baby whose rhythms were still assembling themselves, who sometimes confused day and night and sometimes did not and who was, in any given hour, a mystery in that regard.

He was a good baby.

I want to say this because people say it reflexively about other people’s babies and I want to be clear that it is true and specific rather than reflexive. He was calm and responsive and he had David’s eyes and David’s way of looking at things, the focused attention that David had brought to everything.

He looked at me sometimes with David’s exact expression and I did not know whether to be grateful for this or undone by it.

Both, mostly.

We got through security.

We found the gate.

Louise held my hand for the first part of the walk through the terminal and then took her tablet out and held that, because she was eight and the tablet was the current source of whatever she needed, and I was glad she had it.

We boarded.

The woman was already in the window seat.

She was in her fifties, well-dressed, with the specific posture of someone who traveled frequently and who had opinions about how it should proceed.

When I settled into the aisle seat with Eli in my arms, she looked at me the way people look at babies on planes, the look that is either resigned or actively hostile depending on the person, and this look was the second kind.

She said: if your baby starts screaming, I’m not going to sit here and listen to it. I’m warning you.

I said: he’s calm. He’s been fine today.

She made a sound.

Not a word. A sound.

I settled Eli on my lap and settled the diaper bag under the seat in front of me and checked that the nursing cover was accessible in the outer pocket and took a breath.

Behind me, Louise was arranging herself in her seat.

I turned to check on her.

She was already reading.

She looked up.

She said: we’re okay, Mom.

I said: yes.

The flight was six hours.

For the first three, Eli slept.

He slept with the total commitment of an infant who has decided that this was a sleeping moment, pressed against my chest in the way he slept when he felt the heartbeat that he associated with safety.

The woman next to me read.

She did not speak.

She ate the snack the flight attendant brought.

She adjusted the air vent.

She was present in the way of someone who has decided to tolerate a situation they find unacceptable.

Three hours in, Eli woke.

He woke gradually, the way babies wake, from the deep sleep into a surface restlessness, moving his head, making the small sounds that preceded the hunger sounds.

I rocked him.

I gave him the pacifier.

He took it for forty-five seconds and then rejected it with the specific certainty of someone who knows that the thing being offered is not the thing they want.

He began to cry.

I took the nursing cover from the outer pocket of the diaper bag.

I covered myself.

I began to feed him.

The woman made the sound again.

Then she made words.

She said: oh my god. I paid for this seat not only to listen to someone else’s baby scream, but now I have to watch you feed him too? How shameless.

I said: I’m sorry. I just need to feed him. He’s hungry.

She said: people with babies like that should stay home. What kind of mother are you if you can’t even calm your own child down?

I felt my face go red.

Not from shame.

From something more complex than shame, the specific heat of someone who is receiving unfair treatment in a public space and who is simultaneously managing an infant and a month of grief and the specific vulnerability of a person who is doing her best in conditions that are genuinely difficult.

I said: I apologize for the disruption. He needs to eat. He can’t go without food during a six-hour flight.

She said: then lock yourself in the bathroom and feed him there. Why should I have to sit here and watch you do that? Have some shame.

The other passengers in nearby seats were looking.

Some were looking at the woman with the expression of people who are witnessing something wrong but who have not decided what to do about it.

Some were looking at me with the expression of people who feel sorry for someone but do not know how to show this without becoming involved.

One man across the aisle had his mouth slightly open.

I was going to answer.

I was going to say something, I am not sure what, something composed of the specific combination of exhaustion and grief and the fundamental unreasonableness of being asked to apologize for feeding my child, something that would have been probably too quiet and too apologetic even then.

I did not say it.

Because Louise appeared at my elbow.

She was eight years old and she was holding her tablet and her backpack and she was looking at me with the specific calm of a child who has made a decision.

She said: Mom, why don’t you take my seat? I’ll sit next to this lady so she won’t feel uncomfortable.

I looked at my daughter.

I said: Louise.

She said: it’s fine. I’ll be right behind you.

I said: are you sure?

She said: yes.

The flight attendant had been watching this exchange.

She came over.

She said: would that help?

I said: yes. I think it would.

She said: let me check if there are any other open seats that would work better.

There were not.

It was a full flight.

We switched.

I settled into Louise’s window seat one row back, across the aisle from where I could see both children.

I finished feeding Eli in the window seat with more space and more privacy and the specific relief of being out of the immediate vicinity of the woman’s contempt.

Behind me, or rather in front of me in the original seat, I watched Louise settle in.

She opened her tablet.

She had the small wireless headphones she wore when the sounds were too much.

She was not wearing them.

She had the tablet open to something.

I could not see the screen from where I was.

I watched her show the screen to the woman.

I want to describe what happened next as accurately as I can.

The woman had been looking out the window.

She turned to look at what Louise was showing her, the way adults look at children’s tablets with the slightly patronizing patience of someone humoring a small person.

She looked.

And then she made a sound that was not anything like the sounds she had been making before.

This was a different sound entirely.

She stood up.

In the middle of a flight.

She stood up from her seat with the speed of someone who has received an electric shock and she moved sideways out of the row with the specific urgency of someone who needed to be somewhere else immediately.

The people around us turned.

The flight attendant came back quickly.

The woman said: I need a different seat. I cannot sit there.

The flight attendant said: ma’am, the flight is full. There are no other seats available.

The woman said: then I’ll stand.

The flight attendant said: I can’t allow you to stand during flight. You’ll need to return to your seat.

The woman said: I will not return to that seat.

The flight attendant said: ma’am, can you tell me what happened?

The woman looked at Louise.

Louise was sitting quietly in the seat.

She had closed the tablet.

She was watching with the expression of someone who is waiting for the situation to resolve.

The woman said: that child showed me something on her tablet.

The flight attendant said: what did she show you?

The woman said: it was.

She stopped.

She said: it was a recording.

The flight attendant said: a recording of what?

The woman said: of me. What I said. To the other woman.

The man across the aisle who had been watching said, in a voice that was not angry but was clearly audible: she told a breastfeeding mother she was shameless and should lock herself in the bathroom.

Another passenger said: she yelled at her. A widow with a five-month-old.

The woman said: I don’t know anything about.

She stopped.

She sat back down.

She sat back down next to Louise because the alternative was standing in the aisle for three more hours, and she sat in the very far edge of the seat, as close to the aisle as she could get while technically occupying the seat.

The flight attendant came to me.

She crouched at the aisle next to where I was sitting.

She said: are you all right?

I said: yes.

She said: that was not okay. What she said to you.

I said: I know.

She said: I’m sorry I didn’t intervene sooner.

I said: you got here.

She said: your daughter.

She said it with the specific expression of someone who does not quite have the right words.

I said: yes.

She said: is she usually like that?

I said: her father just died. A month ago.

The flight attendant’s expression changed.

She said: oh.

She said: I’m so sorry.

I said: thank you.

She said: is there anything I can get you?

I said: we’re fine. We’re going to my mother’s.

She said: yes. Good.

She went back to her duties.

I looked at Louise.

Louise looked at me.

She raised her eyebrows in a question.

I raised mine in the same question back.

She made the small face she made when she was indicating that things were manageable.

I made the face I made when I was indicating that I understood.

We had developed this language over the last eleven months.

You develop languages with the people you go through things with.

The remaining three hours of the flight were quiet.

The woman next to Louise did not speak.

She did not look at her tablet or eat the snack that the flight attendant brought, which was brought and set on her tray table without comment and without warmth, the service performed without the friendliness that flight attendants typically performed it with.

The man across the aisle leaned over at one point and said something to Louise that I couldn’t hear.

Louise nodded.

She smiled.

She went back to her book.

Eli slept.

He slept for two of the remaining three hours and was awake and cheerful and interested in the overhead light for the third, which was Eli’s current project, understanding overhead lights and ceiling fans and the lights on top of traffic signals, the specific infant interest in things that are elevated and lit.

I held him and watched him watch the light.

I thought about David.

I thought about the specific quality of David’s presence in a difficult moment, the way he could be in a hard situation without adding to the hardness of it, without performing calm but actually being it, which was different and which I had not fully understood the value of until I was in the hard situations without him.

I thought about Louise.

I had been watching Louise watch things since she was born, the focused attention she brought to the world from the beginning, the quality of observation that David had recognized early and named specifically.

He had said: she sees things.

Not meaning it as a compliment exactly, meaning it as a description. She sees things. She notices things that other people walk past. She stores them and processes them and produces something from them that is hers, that nobody gave her.

He had been so proud of that.

He had been so afraid of missing it.

I thought about the letters in the shoebox.

One for each birthday.

Through to her eighteenth.

He had tried to write to her future self.

I thought: he got this right.

The future self, the one he had tried to write to, was already more than he could have known.

We landed.

The terminal in Phoenix was bright in the specific way of Phoenix, the full desert light that came through the large windows and that was a different quality from the Denver light, warmer and more direct.

My mother was at the arrivals gate.

She was the kind of woman who came to arrivals gates.

She was seventy and had white hair that she had let go white in her early sixties and had never looked back, and she had the bearing of someone who had decided who she was a long time ago and found the decision comfortable.

She saw us.

She came.

She took Eli from my arms without asking, in the way of grandmothers who understand that the first thing is taking the baby, and she held him against her chest with the ease of someone who had held babies for fifty years.

She looked at me.

She said: you’re here.

I said: we’re here.

She held out her other arm.

Louise went under it.

We stood in the Phoenix arrivals terminal in a cluster.

My mother said: I have dinner made.

I said: I know you do.

She said: and the guest room has a crib.

I said: I know.

She said: and it’s warm.

I said: I know.

She said: come on, then.

We walked toward the parking structure.

Louise was quiet on the walk.

When we reached the car, when my mother was settling Eli into the travel carseat she had borrowed from a neighbor, Louise came and stood beside me at the trunk where I was loading the bags.

She said: Mom.

I said: yes.

She said: I have to tell you something.

I said: what?

She said: I recorded her. On my tablet.

I said: I know.

She said: I recorded her from the beginning. When she said the warning thing.

I said: yes.

She said: I thought someone might need to know.

I said: that was smart.

She said: are you mad?

I said: no.

She said: are you sure?

I said: Louise. You protected me. You protected Eli. You did it without causing more conflict than was necessary. You did it by thinking ahead.

I said: I’m not mad.

She said: okay.

She said: I didn’t think about whether the woman would react that way. I thought she would just be embarrassed.

I said: she was, I think. In the worst way.

She said: people don’t like it when they’re seen.

I said: no. They don’t.

She was quiet for a moment.

She said: Daddy used to say that.

I said: yes.

She said: he said everyone wants to be seen on their own terms. But being seen when you don’t control the terms is scary for people.

I said: he was right about that.

She said: I thought showing her what it looked like might help her understand.

I said: I think it did.

She said: do you think she’ll be better?

I thought about this.

I said: I don’t know. Some people see themselves and understand. Some people see themselves and just get angry.

She said: which kind is she?

I said: I think we saw a little of both.

She said: yeah.

She said: I hope she’s okay.

I looked at my daughter.

I said: you hope she’s okay?

She said: I wasn’t trying to make her feel bad. I was trying to make her understand.

She said: there’s a difference.

I said: yes.

I said: Louise.

She said: yeah.

I said: there is a very big difference and you understood it when you were eight years old.

She said: Daddy taught me.

I said: I know.

She said: he would have said something. On the plane.

I said: yes.

She said: but different from what I did.

I said: what do you think he would have said?

She thought.

She said: he would have said something kind. Even if she wasn’t being kind. He always did that.

She said: but I’m not him.

She said: so I did it my way.

I said: yes. You did.

She said: was it okay? My way?

I said: your way was exactly right.

She said: I can’t always do it his way.

I said: no.

She said: I’m me.

I said: yes. You are entirely you.

She said: is that all right?

I said: Louise.

She said: yeah?

I said: it is more than all right. It is exactly what you are supposed to be.

She said: okay.

She went around to the other side of the car.

My mother was closing the carseat.

She looked at me over the roof.

She had heard.

Not all of it. Some of it.

She had the expression of someone who has heard something they are going to carry for a long time.

She said: ready?

I said: yes.

We drove to her house.

The house was the small stucco house she had bought when she moved, with the specific desert landscaping of someone who had learned about xeriscaping and applied it carefully, the cacti and the succulents and the decorative gravel in the colors of the landscape.

Inside it smelled like her, the specific smell of a home organized around one person’s preferences, the candle she had burned for thirty years and the particular brand of hand soap and the dinner she had been making.

Chicken and rice, the dinner that was my childhood dinner, the dinner that meant home in the specific sensory language of a person raised in a particular kitchen.

We ate.

We were quiet for most of it.

Louise ate with the focused attention she gave food, which was also her father’s quality, the treating of meals as something worth paying attention to.

Eli was in the travel bouncer my mother had also borrowed from the neighbor.

He was asleep.

My mother said: how was the flight?

I said: eventful.

She said: oh?

I said: a woman was unkind about Eli. About nursing him.

She said: what did she say?

I told her.

My mother’s expression, which was the expression of a woman in her seventies who had been a nurse for thirty years and who had very specific opinions about how mothers and babies should be treated, moved through several stages.

She said: and?

I said: Louise handled it.

She looked at Louise.

Louise was eating rice.

She said: how did you handle it?

Louise looked up.

She said: I recorded her from the beginning. On my tablet. Then I showed her what it looked like.

My mother said: and?

Louise said: she ran away from her seat.

My mother was quiet.

She said: that was quick thinking.

Louise said: it was Dad’s thing. Document things. If something is happening that you might need to explain later, document it.

My mother said: yes. That does sound like him.

Louise said: I learned it when he was sick. The doctors always wanted to know things, and he would write them down so we could tell the doctors.

She said: I thought it would be useful for the plane.

My mother said: it was.

Louise said: she wasn’t ready to see herself.

She said it with the observation of someone who had thought about it.

My mother said: no. Most people aren’t.

Louise said: I hoped it would make her understand. But I wasn’t sure it would.

My mother said: it probably started something. Something she’ll keep thinking about.

Louise said: do you think so?

My mother said: I think seeing yourself doing something you’re ashamed of is hard to forget.

She said: I think it stays with you.

Louise said: good.

She said it without cruelty.

She said: I want it to stay with her. Because I want her to be better.

My mother looked at her granddaughter.

She said: yes.

She said: I think you might be better at this than most people.

Louise said: at what?

She said: at the difference between wanting someone to feel bad and wanting them to be better.

Louise said: what’s the difference?

She said: wanting someone to feel bad is about you. Wanting them to be better is about them.

Louise thought about this.

She said: I want her to be better for the next person who has a baby on a plane.

My mother said: yes. That’s what I mean.

That night, after Eli was down and Louise was in bed and my mother had done the dishes and I had sat at the kitchen table watching her do them because I could not offer to help and she would not have let me anyway, we sat together with tea.

She said: how are you?

I said: I don’t know.

She said: that’s honest.

I said: I’m something. I’m not sure what.

She said: grief takes a long time to name.

I said: yes.

She said: David.

I said: yes.

She said: he was a remarkable person.

I said: yes.

She said: Louise is his.

I said: she’s hers.

My mother looked at me.

I said: she said it herself. She can’t always do it his way. She’s herself.

My mother said: yes.

She said: that’s the best kind.

She said: the ones who know they’re themselves.

I said: he knew she was.

I said: he was proud of it.

She said: I know.

She said: Rachel.

I said: yes.

She said: you’re going to be all right.

I said: I know.

She said: I don’t mean the financial things or the practical things. Those will also work themselves out.

She said: I mean the deeper thing.

I said: I know what you mean.

She said: you have Louise.

I said: yes.

She said: and Eli.

I said: yes.

She said: and you have the kind of mother-ness that produces a Louise.

I said: I don’t know if I produced her. I think she came that way.

My mother said: they all come that way, partly. But they also grow into whatever the house teaches them.

She said: Louise learned that you document things because of David.

She said: she learned to think about other people because of you both.

She said: she learned that seeing someone is different from punishing them because somewhere in your house that was understood.

I said: David understood it better than I did.

She said: you understood it enough to teach it.

I said: I didn’t think I was teaching it.

She said: you never do.

She refilled the tea.

She said: that woman on the plane.

I said: yes.

She said: what do you think happened to her?

I said: I don’t know.

She said: people who do what she did, who come in already hostile, who escalate the way she did.

She said: something is happening with them.

I said: yes.

She said: it doesn’t excuse it.

I said: no.

She said: but it makes it.

She said: it makes it smaller. When you understand that it isn’t really about you.

I said: yes.

I said: Louise hoped she would be better.

My mother said: Louise is right to hope.

She said: hope is the right posture.

She said: not forgiveness, necessarily. Not permission. But hope.

I said: David always hoped.

She said: yes.

She said: he hoped even when hoping was hard.

I said: especially then.

She said: yes.

She said: that’s where you see what someone is made of.

I looked at my mother.

She was seventy years old and she had been a nurse for thirty years and she had buried her own husband fifteen years ago and she was sitting in her kitchen in Phoenix with her daughter and her grandchildren.

She was made of something specific.

I said: Mom.

She said: yes.

I said: thank you.

She said: you don’t need to thank me.

I said: I know. I want to.

She said: drink your tea.

I drank my tea.

In the morning, Louise was up before us.

I came to the kitchen and found her at the table with her tablet and her book and a glass of juice my mother had left in the refrigerator for her.

She was not reading.

She was looking out the window at my mother’s garden, at the desert plants that were already bright in the morning light.

I sat across from her.

She said: it’s different here.

I said: from Denver?

She said: from home.

I said: yes.

She said: but good different.

I said: yes. I think so.

She said: Mom.

I said: yes.

She said: are we going to be okay?

I looked at my daughter.

She was eight years old.

She had braided hair that her father had learned to do from a YouTube video.

She was the specific child that David had seen and been proud of.

She was entirely herself.

She was asking a question that was too large for any honest person to answer with certainty.

I said: yes.

She said: really?

I said: yes. We’re going to be okay.

She said: how do you know?

I said: because you’re you.

She said: that’s not an answer.

I said: yes it is.

She said: how?

I said: because I watched you on the plane yesterday. You saw something wrong happening and you thought about how to address it without making it worse. You put yourself in a difficult seat so I could be comfortable. You hoped for a person who had been unkind to us.

I said: a person who can do all of that is going to be okay. And a family that has a person like that in it is going to be okay.

She said: I just did what made sense.

I said: I know.

She said: Daddy would have done more.

I said: Daddy is not here.

She said: I know.

I said: so you did what you could. And it was enough. And it will keep being enough.

She said: what if it’s not always enough?

I said: then we figure out what else to do.

She said: like he did.

I said: like he did.

She said: okay.

She went back to looking at the garden.

Eli woke up in the other room, the small sounds of a baby moving from sleep to wakefulness.

I stood.

I went to get him.

My mother appeared in the hallway at the same time, from her room.

She said: I’ll get him.

I said: you don’t have to.

She said: I want to.

She went to get Eli.

I went back to the kitchen.

Louise was still looking at the garden.

I stood beside her.

She said: there’s a hummingbird.

I said: where?

She said: by the red cactus.

I looked.

There was.

A hummingbird hovering at the specific flower of the cactus, the small frantic wings, the precise beak.

We watched it.

Louise said: how do they do that? Hover like that?

I said: their wings beat very fast. Dozens of times a second.

She said: that sounds exhausting.

I said: I think it just works that way for them.

She said: they don’t know it’s hard because it’s just how they are.

I said: yes.

She said: I think I’m like that about some things.

I said: yes. I think so too.

She said: is that okay?

I said: that you make something hard look easy because it’s how you are?

She said: yeah.

I said: yes. That’s okay.

She said: Daddy was like that.

I said: yes.

She said: I think I got it from him.

I said: yes.

She said: do you think he knows?

I looked at my daughter.

The hummingbird was still at the cactus.

My mother was in the other room talking to Eli in the soft nonsense language of grandmothers.

The Phoenix morning was bright through the window.

I said: yes.

She said: how?

I said: because he wrote you letters.

She said: I know about the letters.

I said: yes.

She said: I’m not ready to read them.

I said: I know. That’s all right.

She said: but he wrote them because he knew me.

I said: yes.

She said: so he knows.

I said: yes. He knows.

The hummingbird left.

The flower was still there, slightly disturbed, already returning to its stillness.

Louise picked up her book.

I made coffee.

My mother came in with Eli, who was awake and interested in the kitchen light.

We were there.

We were all there, in my mother’s kitchen in Phoenix, in the desert morning light.

Not okay yet.

But on the way.

Which is, in the end, the only way anyone ever is.