Dear Lady at the Coffee Shop

Dear Lady at the Coffee Shop,

I noticed that the sounds my daughter was making bothered you. Your vociferous grumblings, along the lines of: …screaming and crying children… bah! … were heard from the booth in which we sat, and were not much appreciated.

When I set my boiling anger aside I can find empathy for you. Perhaps you were tired after a long walk into town. Perhaps you were hot and looking for a nice place to rest, read your paper, and sip your iced coffee in peace. Perhaps you never had children and the mere sight of them causes your heart to stir in uncomfortable ways. Perhaps you fought with your lover in the early morn and could not handle any further outbursts of emotion. Perhaps you always grumble when hearing the cries of a child, a habit you learned early on and cannot drop.

Any version of my wild imaginings allow me to love you a little bit and hate you a little less.

But I’d also like to give you some information: parents do not want their children to scream or cry. Their pain and suffering is something we seek to prevent with all the might and skills that we possess. We especially do not want them to scream or cry in the cafe and disturb old ladies drinking their coffee and reading the paper. Many parents will avoid public outings altogether so as to preserve the relative peace of the non-reproducing public. Other parents will yank their children roughly by the arm, dragging them to a discreet location where they can spank them for expressing themselves in such a way, where the parent can unleash a stream of their own insecurity and shame for having bothered a person such as yourself.

I am not one of these parents although I too, in my own way, seek to please others, to make them smile at my child and feel happy to see us, not inspire them to grumble irritatingly at the sound of her discontent. But while I long for your approval, I will not sacrifice my girl in order to receive it. I believe she is a human being with equal rights to downtown coffee shops. When she cries in dismay I choose to hold her, finding that response far less disturbing than escalating the situation and noise with violence and threats. In fact, the screaming and crying you mentioned while flipping through the news lasted less than ten seconds and was followed by an hour of quiet contentment.

Perhaps this information might also prove helpful: a bagel arriving with cream cheese instead of butter is upsetting to a three-year old. So might the position of a water glass, or a beloved squeaky shoe falling from the booth and into the depths that lie beneath the table. There are hundreds of small, seemingly unimportant instances that can cause torrential grief in a small human. Their world is littered with emotional land mines, but thankfully, in my opinion, children are not yet shackled by social constraint. My girl didn’t see you behind us in the booth, and in any case wouldn’t know that unleashing the secrets of her heart would be disturbing, to you or anyone else. Where you, or I, suffer from withholding our pain, she does not. Her heart is clear and unfettered.

When I heard you, over the whimpers of my cradled girl, I wanted to spring up and shout in your face. Imagining carrying out this reaction, so out of character for me, entertained me long enough for my heart to still, for my focus to resettle on my girl’s tangly locks. You don’t know. You simply do not know. Your heart is tucked so far within, so far from the surface that you think it is my child’s cries that disturb you, not something that you brought along, something old, and faded and permanently imbedded. You do not know, or do not remember what heartache feels like when you release it immediately, what it sounds like as it echoes off the walls of a cafe.

I am no longer mad.

Love,

Me