I have left my baby on walls, in public toilets, up trees, on trains, rolled under beds and, on one very memorable occasion, in an envelope at the bottom of my handbag. I had to fumble under keys, books, a spare jumper and some tissues to pull it out. Not in real life, you understand; but in a thousand sweaty, sleepless, eye-juddering, neck-clasping nightmares. For one woman this week, that nightmare became true.
Like John Candy in his polka van seeking to bring solace to Kevin’s mother in Home Alone, I am not here to criticise the woman who left her baby in a Saudi airport as she boarded the plane to Kuala Lumpur. I have no right or any authority to question any other parent’s ability to cope under stress or navigate the unfamiliar. I certainly have no interest in puffing up my own sense of smug accomplishment by revelling in comparison and mother-bashing (here’s looking at you, YouTube commenters). I have left enough bags, coats, phones, tickets and keys on enough benches, buses and other people’s bonnets, while juggling and jiggling a helpless baby, to know that sometimes you simply do not have the capacity to carry all the disparate parts of your life along without occasionally faltering. About two months into motherhood I spent two hours in my own garden sitting on a plastic bag, entertaining the baby with clothes pegs and singing the songs from Aladdin because I had forgotten not just my keys and wallet, but also any snacks, toys, or phone.
Without the help of strangers or the assistance of a partner, you cannot simultaneously inhabit all the thousands of contingencies involved in moving through the world with a baby, without sometimes falling short. I’m sure this passenger wished she’d left her passport behind and not her offspring, but that is not what happened. Instead of asking how this aeroplane woman did it, I would ask: who helped her? Where was the baby’s father? Who first noticed a baby sitting alone in a departure gate? How did the other passengers react when she realised the unimaginable had happened?
Listening to a video of the exchange, it is heartening to hear the air traffic controller describe this presumably frantic woman as “poor thing” when dealing with the pilot’s request to turn back to King Abdulaziz airport. Although, as one particularly cynical friend of mine (a mother of four boys) joked, of course they would rather turn a plane around than look after the baby themselves or, worse, take the baby on a long-haul flight to meet her. There were times during my first year of motherhood when I would have given all my hair, half my blood and what was left of my money for eight hours of eating, drinking, napping and watching television within the hermetically sealed privacy of a long-distance flight, as long as someone else had been looking after my child and I hadn’t got mastitis.
It is also entirely understandable to me that the pilot doesn’t say that the woman wants to come back but that “she is refusing to continue the flight”. In the first few, terrifying months of my son’s life I came to know that feeling all too well: in the face of stress, sickness, separation or screaming, you simply refuse to carry on with the linear nature of time or the rules of physical space until the problem is solved. Who cares that you are thousands of feet in the air travelling through clouds? You refuse to continue. You must go back.
How many of us, I wonder, in the infantilised, impersonal, disorienting world of international air travel have accidentally relaxed, or reverted to a pre-responsible state? How many of us have waited to be told we can go to the toilet by a light-up display, waited to be told to step forward by someone in a navy polyester uniform and high-definition make-up? Perhaps this woman wasn’t just “busy with WhatsApp or Instagram” as one YouTube idiot suggests, nor utterly reliant on a nanny as others have sniped: maybe she just, accidentally and briefly, relaxed. She lowered her guard, and went into – if you’ll pardon the expression – autopilot. Women do it all the time. Men do it too. David Cameron, as we know, did it in the pub.
In the strange, twilight, timeless months of my son’s early life I experienced, over and over again, that strange sensation of having a body that, apparently, was divided into two separate, conflicting figures. There was this me, here, standing on a cold, tiled floor with my chest leaking and the smell of burning toast in my nose; and there was that me over there, lying on a sheepskin, howling in anguish. After nine months my body had fragmented into two – two distinct and disorienting collections of needs – where previously there had been just one.
Simultaneously, the world around us had somehow splintered into an unfathomable array of dangers, deadlines and duties. I needed to clean up that sick on his mattress but also feed the baby, open the window, change their clothes, answer the door, go to the toilet and remember what time our health visitor appointment was. It was a lot to juggle, a lot to contend with, a lot to remember. And so, inevitably, I fucked up. The only difference was that, rather than soaring through the sky on the way to Malaysia in panic, I was covered in sick on the 55 bus realising I had no Wet Wipes.
• Nell Frizzell is a columnist and writer
