Safety Not Guaranteed
By Lori Barrett
When I was eight months pregnant a Danish mother parked her baby stroller outside a barbecue restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. She sat inside, eyes on the stroller, and had a drink, something not unheard of in Denmark and other European countries. Police arrested the woman, strip searched her, and took the baby away for four days. The story captivated me, and all of New York City, in the summer of 1997.
Before moving out of the East Village to set up house in Brooklyn, my husband and I had eaten greasy ribs at that same restaurant, sipped from the same plastic red tumblers the mother, Anita Sorenson, used. I knew how little room waitstaff had to navigate between tables. There was no space for a stroller.
I wondered if we would have done the same: leave our sleeping baby and stroller outside and watch through a window. It didn’t seem out of the question. We’d be able to see if the baby woke or if a stranger approached.
***
I had my baby, Henry, a few months later. Among the gifts I got was a seafoam green stroller with a cushioned handle, larger and brighter than the other strollers in our gentrifying neighborhood. Wealthy parents pushed streamlined models in gray or black, muted colors that followed grunge into the mainstream.
***
As Henry grew and I contemplated my return to work, an essay appeared in The New Yorker by Stacy Schiff. It opened with this: “My children lead fairy-tale lives in one respect: they have a generally absent mother.”
I thought about Sorenson, the not quite absent mother. But Schiff’s words reassured me. Even if society is against the working mother—this was even more true in 1997 than today—literature is not. In stories children fly, Schiff wrote. She listed the ways: on four-poster beds, on laughing gas, on fairy dust, in restored race cars, on a Christlike lion, in houses caught in cyclones.
“But they never fly when their mothers are around,” she wrote.
***
One afternoon I wheeled Henry in the bright green stroller to the Salvation Army on Atlantic Avenue to browse clothes for work in my new mother-shaped body. The store was mostly quiet. A young couple browsed men’s teeshirts. Employees laughed in a back room as they sorted donations. I walked past the furniture and kitchenware displayed in the front windows to look at blazers.
A woman with a cart full of children’s shoes and clothes browsed in the same aisle. We nudged hangers along the rack, making a chorus of screeching metal.
The door to the store opened. I didn’t look up.
Someone yelled, “Everybody get down.”
I looked then.
I was aware of a weapon referred to as a sawed-off shotgun, an idea that made me think of Elmer Fudd. I discovered, as I looked toward the cash register, there is nothing cartoonish about such a weapon.
I looked from the man holding a gun to my stroller. I crouched and tipped it slightly to hide the bright handle. The woman who’d been browsing behind me also crouched. We were close enough to touch.
“My baby,” I whispered.
She gestured to a rack of long gowns.
I crawled and shoved the stroller behind a curtain of sequins and satin. My stomach ricocheted between my ribs.
What if Henry cried?
I squatted between the gowns and the woman. I stared at the linoleum floor and tried to hear what was happening at the register.
After a few minutes that felt like a few hours we heard the door close. Customers slowly stood. I pulled the stroller back into the light. Henry was fine. I walked home panting and shaking. I collapsed in my dining room, called my husband and cried. Then I got an incoming call. My boss wanted to know the exact date I’d be back.
Did I really want to leave Henry in someone else’s care?
I returned to Schiff’s essay. Mothers play their roles offstage, she wrote, allowing children to be the heroes and heroines of the tale.
Reassuring. But most stories with flying children don’t take place in America, where our notion of safety means motherhood is more regulated than guns. We allow firearms in movie theaters, malls, and some schools. But we arrest moms if they let a child walk to the park alone, if a child skips school, or if a baby is left asleep in a stroller outside a restaurant. Mothers of color and poor mothers feel this policing the most.
I know, mothers can be scary and in need of regulation. Whether they’re a partner or a parent, they’ll brazenly ask you to unload the dishwasher and put away your clothes. To come home for the holidays. They’re in the workplace, reflexively thinking about time saving and asking you to multitask. Always annoying, especially as they age.
***
Sorenson wrote a novel about her treatment in America called A Worm in the Apple. The cover features an illustration of the stroller drawn by her now adult daughter, who’s about the same age as now-adult Henry.
I think about the different lives our children have had, one growing up in a part of the world consistently voted the happiest. The creators of the World Happiness Index note that happiness doesn’t equal exuberance. It has to do with comfort. A wealthier country is not always happier. It has more to do with access to free healthcare and childcare. That allows parents to look away so kids might float off on an adventure.
I went back to work. I left Henry with an older woman with years of caregiving experience. She feared the subway. Every night after work I sprinted home in my thrift store blazers and platform shoes, flying so she could catch a bus. Both of us living with a touch of make believe.
About the Author
Lori Barrett still has the trophy she won for being quietest in her high school graduating class many decades ago. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Barrelhouse, Citron Review, Laurel Review, Peatsmoke Journal, and Middle House Review, where she was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and a prison writing mentor. Find more of her work at www.LoriBarrettwrites.com.
