get me a ticket for an aer-o-plane

G and I are bearing the scars of our first flight à deux, and we are bearing them bravely. We spent a wonderful weekend in the hills above Nice with our friends Mme. and M. Marron and their daughters, the current fervid center of G’s tiny but expanding universe (he’s woken up every morning since calling their names).

It was a busy weekend of hiking, eating, dog-wrangling, and escape-hatch finding, and we subsequently arrived at the airport on Monday afternoon napless and still raring to go. We spent a long time at the Air France ticket counter dealing with the possibly insurmountable bureaucratic challenge of G having been issued a ticket at Paris Orly the previous Friday under my last name, when the name on his passport and carte de sejour is undeniably different. Perhaps the lady at the counter was actually worried that I might succeed in smuggling the world’s tiniest terrorist into the heart of Paris, which would all be traced back to her lack of due diligence at the ticket counter, or perhaps she was just exercising her duty as a true fonctionnaire. Either way, the final issuing of our tickets involved multiple consultations with colleagues and a trip to the back office, behind a mirrored door.

During the wait, G got a bit squirmy, a situation which was not improved by the snaking security line or the subsequent few minutes in the departure lounge before boarding. I kept him mostly distracted on my lap with cookies and airplane-spotting, but still the one time I let him down to stretch his legs, he darted behind the check-in desk and almost boarded another plane before we managed to stop him. This was just a harbinger of things to come.

In my oh-so-infinite wisdom, I had chosen the 4:00 flight back to Paris – the last flight you can take after a morning meeting in Nice that will still get you home in time for dinner. The plane was packed, and mostly with men in expensive suits carrying Hermès briefcases. There were a couple of other families on the plane, but instead of corralling us in the back along with the small animals and the flight attendants, the way they had done on the way over, we were dotted around the plane, every man for himself. G and I were squeezed into a window seat beside two of the expensive businessmen, who blessedly gave us tolerant smiles and then pretended we weren’t there. This attitude soon began to require expanded powers of imagination, as Air France proceeded to hold us on the tarmac for 20 minutes with no air conditioning while we waited for a delayed connecting flight.

G does not like to be hot. In fact, being hot probably falls on his list somewhere just above taking medicine and only slightly below being stuck with a poker. He also doesn’t much like being confined. As the plane got hotter, I think he reasonably thought to himself, well, I’ll just get down off Mommy’s lap and walk around for a minute until the situation improves. Except that no one was allowed to get up in the face of imminent departure, and he would have had to crawl over three people to get anywhere, anyway. I said no, he wiggled, and I tightened my hold some more, haunted by visions of a resourceful G actually crawling under the seat in front of us.

Realizing he had reached the end of his options, G started to scream. Loud, piercing, unrelenting screams of a depth and decibel level that are unimaginable unless you have happened to experience them personally. A friend visiting over the summer who witnessed the screams during a particularly reluctant nap session said to me afterward, “If I heard a child screaming like that without any reference, I would call the police.”

The woman in front of us asked to be moved. The flight attendant came over and asked us if everything was ok, which in polite language the world over means, “Can’t you do something about your child?” The American woman sitting behind us, who didn’t realize that I could understand her, or even hear her over the screams, said to her companion, “It kind of makes you rethink having children, doesn’t it?”

I actually thought about how difficult it would be for us to ask to get off the airplane and rent a car.

And then, finally, they turned the air conditioning on, and revved up the jets, and we took off. G stopped crying almost as soon as the first blast of air hit us, although he didn’t stop wiggling or eliciting evil glares from the woman in front of us who was not, in fact, moved. At the end of the flight, we slunk off the plane, avoiding eye contact, gathered our luggage, and got a taxi home. The taxi driver smiled at us and told me that G had beautiful eyes, and I was so grateful I gave him an enormous tip.

To all of you without children who have ever flown with me and my counterparts, I am sorry. If there were any other way to get from here to there, we would do it, even if it involved drawing our own blood with a dirty needle.

Twice.