When we were on our way back from Easter in North Carolina, our flight was delayed for five hours. Normally this would cause me to become hysterical, but I was experiencing a natural high. Because at the airport, there was a mother traveling with two children and the boy was throwing a very respectable tantrum. The mother did everything right, she remained calm and firm, really she was a model of good parenting, but he was just too far gone. I was sitting there, trying not to look, because I’ve so been where she was at that time (minus the remaining calm and firm, a model of good parenting part) and I didn’t want to stare but at the same time I certainly did not want to miss the part where his head was going to spin completely around and he was going to start spewing pea soup. Because I knew that we were minutes away from having to stage an exorcism on this fallen angel and I was sure that it would further delay our flight.
But my favorite part of the whole thing was that my son, MY SON, who is on standby at Central Casting for when they need “tantrum child”, looked up from his book (Sponge Bob Square Pants, but it had, you know, pages) and said “can we move to a different seat? That misbehaving child is really distracting me.” Â