So much of a new parent’s life can be spent latching buckles. After my husband went back to work, I was the one who latched my daughter into the high chair, into the changing table, into the swing. With each click into place, I sensed my own movement being restricted. The bureaucracy of motherhood had turned time into a thick slurry. The tight, tired feeling in my lower back became a permanent fixture. I tried yoga. I tried therapy. I tried more coffee. I had many sweet moments with my baby, but nothing was as sweet as the relief when my husband returned and took the baby.
Finally, one bleak winter morning, some elemental instinct made me get out of the apartment with the baby in a sling and walk to the bus stop. It was going toward the riverfront in Brooklyn. When we got there, though, I realized that I didn’t particularly want to be there. Where I wanted to be was on the bus.
Soon this became a habit. I didn’t care which bus or where it was going. Dazed from lack of sleep, I would walk out of my building with the baby snug against me. If there was a bus at the corner, I would get on it. If not, I would walk to the next corner and catch whichever one happened to stop. The bus itself became my destination. A place to sit, a window to look through as the world streamed by, offering itself without demanding anything. I didn’t know it then, but I was relearning how to test my boundaries in this strange new world of parenting.
Until then, I had gone years without riding a bus. If I needed to get anywhere, I took the subway. Like many New Yorkers, I had figured out exactly where to wait on the train platform so that I could exit efficiently when going to work or coming home. Buses tended to be slow and plodding, beholden to traffic. But now, with a baby bundled to my chest, I was slow and plodding too. We were perfect for each other.
I felt like a kind of flaneur—an aimless wanderer melting into the anonymity of the city. For a long time, the freedom and curiosity of flaneurie was associated with men, but being a mother gave my wandering its own richness. The presence of a baby was like an invisibility cloak. It made me uninteresting and unavailable. Nothing to see here. Men whose eyes might have lingered before looked through me now. Only after I became imperceptible to others did I fully realize the weight I had been carrying: the burden of looking busy and indifferent, fending off attention—the pressure of being constantly looked at. In those limbo days of early motherhood, I pulled this anonymity around me while welcoming a different kind of attention.
It helped that in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the buses were full of passengers—many of them immigrants like me—whose attitude toward babies in public places was one of hospitality. Fellow riders made duck and cat noises, played peekaboo behind bulging shopping bags, and let my daughter’s little exploring hands touch their umbrellas and bags. It didn’t bother me when passengers told me the baby must be cold, the baby must be overheating, the baby must be overdressed, the baby must be hungry, the baby must be tired. I understood it to be phatic: a stranger’s way of saying I am a fellow human looking out for the youngest member of our tribe. Sharing space with strangers as a new mother was an act of faith in the world. It was also a rejoinder to the peculiarly American loneliness of nuclear-family child-raising.
Especially during the holiday season, the parenting sections of publications are full of articles about how to travel with children—how to entertain them on road trips and flights, which toys are the best for long journeys. Some of this guidance is useful, and so many of us, raising children far away from our extended families, need this parenting wisdom. But after a certain point, the overflow of advice convinces us that a child cannot be managed without this information. We start internalizing that the world outside is so dangerous and our children so willful that the encounter between the two must be controlled through distraction and consumption.
But taking my daughter on those meandering bus rides taught me that fellow travelers can be trusted to offer you kindness and understanding. In the years that followed, I rarely felt anxious about traveling anywhere with a small child. A child unravels the individualism that we often associate with travel. The lovely strangers on the Brooklyn buses trained me to think of the world as a slow, gentle bus that we are all on.
For those three months of her first winter, my daughter and I journeyed together across the city. Now I marvel at what a strange experience it was. Being out in public with your child in the early days of parenting is already an exercise in reinvention. To the world, you are just another mother with her child. To you, the world is a different place. While spending that time on buses, supposedly doing nothing, my daughter and I were actually learning to trust each other—and everyone else.
My favorite moment to be on a bus was the soft-spoken hour before the sun set. We saw gas stations and silent leafless trees and graffiti on the side of an ancient building and playgrounds with someone’s water bottle left on a bench. On a block of creamy Victorian mansions, suddenly a bold red door. Nestling against a smooth bus seat, my beautiful little burden breathing on me, I felt transported, again and again and again.
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