The True Cost of Dive-Bombing Birthrates
+ our less-than-stellar Europe experience
It started at the airport.
K + I hauled our children, five tickets, and ten bags (count ‘em—personal + 5 carry-ons) to the airport gate. We were already sweaty and tired; our 3 week trip was off to a rough start with a canceled flight. But we’d been rebooked, we’d distracted our children with Nintendo switches, and we’d packed our 3 ounce liquids in plastic bags. We were ready.
“This is too many bags,” the airline attendant told us sternly. “You need to check some.”
“What?” I asked, confused. “Don’t we each get a personal item and carry-on?”
“Yes, but this is a lot of bags. It’s too many.”
“We have five tickets,” said K, in his best smoothing-over tone. “If we can just—”
“It’s too many bags,” she snapped. “That’s how we do things here.”
Two managers later, with me literally having to pull up the airline’s own rules on my phone, they let us through with our bags—including my youngest daughter’s preschool-sized pink LL Bean backpack, holding nothing but a stuffed animal and an empty water bottle, that they’d tried to insist we had to check.
We brushed it off. (Well, K brushed it off. I stewed over it for hours because I am who I am.)
After landing in Copenhagen, after the kids had slept nearly the entire flight like the little angels they aren’t, my 8-year-old kind of cut someone off. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but he wasn’t looking where he was going and stepped in front of a middle aged man. You would have thought he’d slapped him in the face, the way this man threw his hands in the air. I’m taking deep breaths as my husband reminds me he must be having a really bad day, you don’t know where he’s headed, maybe he was in a really big hurry because of an emergency and are any of us at are best in emergencies? Okay, fine. Exhale. After all, I’d been told that Denmark was a haven for families; I’d been told their many child-friendly and family-supportive systems were because kids were valued members of society there.
But throughout the next few days, too many of these incidents piled up for it to be anything but coincidence. Ice cream scoopers snapping at my kids to keep their fingers off an ice cream display case (they were pointing out which flavor they wanted too aggressively, I guess?) A man at the next airport asking my daughter to please, please not cry on the flight (while she’d been sitting quietly.) Another person, sighing deeply at us in the bathroom line as my 3-year-old got whiney (she wasn’t screaming, just making some extremely slight toddler fussy-noises). A woman at the beach straight up howling at my son for getting sand on her as he dug with his shovel (I had immediately told him to cool it on the digging and she was a good 15 feet away from us—she was barely touched by the sand, but proceeded to glare at me for a good minute afterwards while I glared right back).
I didn’t have evidence for any of it. But I finally turned to my husband, in a fit of exasperation, and said “do you feel like they just don’t like kids over here?”