Parenting in Public: Part II, Restless in Restaurants

By now you, my four faithful followers, have doubtlessly read my diatribe on children in grocery stores and have decided either a) I am overly cynical about children and should not be allowed in public during daylight hours, or b) I am overly honest and have finally put into words what you have also thought during your grocery-shopping-to-the-soundtrack-of-shrieking-children experiences but hesitated to say out loud. With that, I am going to use my insider information to enlighten you on what actually happens when parents bring their children to restaurants. Let's begin with the obvious.

Imagine the scenario: you're settling down in a booth with your significant other. You've had a long, hard week, and all you can think of is how nice it is to finally relax with the person you love. You'll have interesting conversation, a good meal after which you won't have to clean up, and by the end of dinner you will feel so refreshed you'll be ready to enjoy the rest of your evening. As you lean back into your booth, you feel a thump against the back of your head. Assuming it must have been an accidental bump as the person behind you also gets settled, you let the incident go unnoticed. Till it happens again. And again. And again. Upon the fourth thump you realize that the thumping is not from some well-intentioned adult but from an overly boisterous and uncontrolled four year-old behind you who is using your head as the recipient of his makeshift drum stick. You wait a minute, confident that his parents will realize what he is doing and punish him appropriately. After several minutes, you turn around to ask for help only to realize his parents are enveloped in their own quiet, relaxing evening on the other side of the booth, completely unaware of and unconcerned with their son's latest antics. Over the next forty-five minutes that feels more like three hours, the young boy grows increasingly restless and appeases himself with shrieking, singing, and an ill-conceived but long-lasting one-sided food fight. At the end of this time, you finally accept that his parents have chosen your side of the booth as his babysitter/personal entertainer for the evening, and you leave the restaurant $45 poorer but with a stronger-than-ever headache that will surely survive the weekend despite your best defenses of Excedrin and Advil. That, my friends, is only Round One.

What hapless customers again fail to realize is that your experiences as a fellow customer/guest only make up a small part of the overall effect a child has on a restaurant. As a server, I saw the head-thumping child on more than one occasion. However, I also saw his parents distract him during the day by letting him drink straight from a bottle of steak sauce. I saw his mother pacify him by breast-feeding him, uncovered, while she continued her conversation (and, yes, I'm still talking about the four year-old). I saw his father change his diaper on the table where you have since eaten a meal, and I then found that same diaper four weeks later when I pulled the booth away from the wall to clean behind it. Rest assured that these were not the regular occurrences you fear them to be. We'll call these experiences Round Two. After all, how much trouble can one little boy really cause all by himself? Round Three introduces the next round of havoc-reaking when the tiny terror that is Snowflake brings his siblings.

Together, the siblings - or Snowflake, Precious, and TinyTyrant as I will now call them - bring us to a deeper level of hell in the restaurant world. It takes nine boys to make a softball team, but it only takes three to get a decent game of tag around the tables whilst the servers walk by balancing endless plates of hot food and trays of drinks sure to break if they fall. Yes, I saw this game. Yes, it happened more than once. Of course, many parents realize that unsupervised boys will cause such trouble, and no one wants to be associated with such embarrassment. The solution? The parents who request a booth on the opposite side of the restaurant from their own children. This was a weekly occurrence and a different family almost every time. Whereas Snowflake could only start a decent drum beat with the back of your head, Precious can accompany him with the silverware-to-plates instrument, and TinyTyrant will be right there with them and his oh-so-adorable solo. This, my friends, is Round 3, also known as the inner level of restaurant hell.

To be fair, these children do not account for all children I saw while working in a restaurant. There were plenty of children who were well-behaved, controlled, and even cute. There were also plenty of parents who were aware of their responsibilities to the patrons around them and more than happy to control their children as necessary. However, every time Tracey suggests we have a family dinner in a restaurant, these are not the children I remember. Likewise, no matter how well-behaved (read: trained) my own daughter is, I don't want to surround her with these children anymore than I want to risk her becoming one of them.

So there you have it. After seven years of working in public service positions, I came out of these jobs with almost no savings, very little resume padding, but just enough resentment toward my experiences to ensure my daughter never gets to go anywhere. In a world of paradoxical irony, I imagine someday Ellie will take her own children everywhere she goes, refuse to control their behavior for fear of damaging their fragile ideas of self-worth, and ultimately be the mother of the children I couldn't stand in the first place. And those kids will be my grandchildren.