Motha Wha?!

I was on the 6 train commuting to wherever I was going (I was doing the pseudo sleep-sit at the time which meant I must have been on my way downtown)and the train was crowded enough where all the seats were full and a couple were standing in front of me. On the other side of the couple, sitting across from me, was a mother and her young child in a stroller. Anyone living in the city knows what a pain a stroller is for the mother and other train commuters, but physical mass wasn't the issue in this particular case. The child started to cry, he wanted to get out, but the train was in motion and crowded so the mother kept him in. He started to buck up and down back and forth. Soon the sporadic cries turned to consistent wailing. 

Crying children do not bother me. Having raised my brother for the first eleven years of his life, I can take it. At this point, crying children actually make me laugh. Not in a cynical way but that's another story - I digress. Anyways, there is nothing to make the kid stop. He just wants to get out but he can't. The mother is not going to let him out which is right, so he goes on wailing. I see this through the slit of my mostly closed eye (I say "eye" because for some reason my right eye opens easier than my left...)and in my pseudo sleep state a very clear wantonly authoritarian voice breaks through and a woman starts to criticize the mother. "If that were my child, it would know who's boss.... You have to train them like dogs." The guy she was with laughingly agreed with her in the way you do when you don't want to garner your companion's wrath. 

That obnoxious comment was coming from the woman standing directly in front of me. I made no motion to show I had heard her opinion nor made any comment to show my disdain. You have to pick your battles and her ignorance about child rearing was just not worth it. Plus, I know she'll be eating her words once she has a child of her own. Even though I will not be there to witness it, the prospect is enough for me to deem justice served.

What did surprise me was after the next stop, the couple took over the emptied seats next to the mother and I saw that the woman was Asian. For some reason, I am assuming other Asian women to have the same knowledge about the frustrations and complications of raising a child that I have, but that is ignorant of me to assume other Asians within my generation were tasked with role of being an associate parent to your younger siblings. Perhaps she was the youngest, or the only child. Who knows, but I felt bad for her. Poor girl has no idea and clearly no one to tell her.