Riding in Car With Boys

I was anticipating a quiet and comfy ride as I boarded the executive class train-car of Purwojaya, leaving from Gambir for Cilacap. However, a quick assesment of other passengers told me that apparently there were at least three kids sharing the same car. Immediately I realize that ‘quiet and comfy’ had just gone out the window.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like children. I enjoy the way they stare at you like you are a Martian. I love the cooing and the wobbly walk. I’m just not very fond of their banshee-like shrieking.

It’s not their fault, really. They are just much too young and inexperienced to grasp the concept of ‘public nuisance’ and they still have limited vocabulary range and grammatical understanding so whenever they cannot convey something in proper diction or grammar, they howl. Their parents, on the other hand, are very much aware of those concepts and quite capable of using proper rules of linguistics so they always try to put an end to the shriekings by hook and sometimes crook. I have seen this done so many times that I manage to categorize the approaches used by those poor parents to silence their children.

First, and the most widely used, is the authority approach. “We’re the parents and you will shut up when we tell you to shut up”. This and a fair amounts of buttock pinching usually do the trick. Too much pinching, however will result in the increase of noise-level. Verbal threats like “Wait till we get home!” or “No more cookies for you!” rarely work. The second approach is the diversion. Parents try to divert the crying children’s attention by pointing to another direction and said “Look! A cow!” It is safer, however, to point OUTSIDE. Pointing somewhere inside the car and saying the aforementioned phrase is not advised. If this doesn’t work however, they usually use the same technique but with a more fascinating animal. Their last resort of parents in favor of this approach will be to make funny face and voices. Other than ridiculous, it is also useless. The third and final approach is to succumb to the crying children’s demand. Give them what they want. Milk, candy, sweets, cookies, everything. This the most effective but ego bruising at the same times.

My observation also tells me that parents make all that efforts for a single motive. They are not disturbed by the noise because after several years of parenthood they became immune to it. They are more concerned by the thought that other people will consider them as a ‘bad’ parents as to not to be able to control their own offsprings. Hmm..maybe I was wrong with my earlier assumption. Maybe those ungrateful brats DO understand the conceptions of public nuisances and furthermore use that angle to force their parents to do their biddings. The controllers become the controllees. These evil geniuses come up with this barbaric extortion scheme with their ability to produce high-pitched wailings to demand stuffs from their forsaken parents who in order to avoid being branded as ‘bad’ parents will have no other choice but to comply. Brilliant.

So let’s get back to my would-be-unpleasant situation. The first child sat right in front of my and was busy staring at the moving landscape. Must have been a pretty fascinating sight for one so young. Somebody should tell him that it was the train that moved. Not the landscape. The second child was across the aisle and was asleep. I couldn’t see what the third was doing because she was seated a few rows back. All is quiet in the western front. But not for long.

The train barely passed Bekasi when the child across the aisle decided that it was time to wake up. Upon finding himself in a strange environment which was nothing like, I imagine, his colorful room with cut-out cartoon characters hanging above his bed, he started to howl his head off. His parents frantically tried to calm him down with the diversion tactique, pointing to every possible directions and saying many irrelevant words, from ‘a tree’ to ‘a whale’. Cookies and chocolate offers ensued but the wailing kid just wouldn’t budge. I can’t help but wonder whether there was a telephatic relationship among children because the first kid’s screaming immediately triggered the child sitting right in front of me. He stopped watching the running trees and began to cry in earnest. Louder too. In matter of minutes the third child happily joined the chorus and was accompanied by another one further back, I must have missed him during the headcount. All hell broke loose is much too mild to describe this erratic scene. Four high spirited children in a united effort to break the world record for noise level and four set of busy parents trying various tricks to prevent them. It was like being at Limp Bizkit concert, only less entertaining.

Two years later, their soul-numbing wailings still had not subdued and people were getting restless. I had to hand it to the kids for their stamina and tenacity. A young woman made some suggestions to the second child’s parents but his mother was quick to point out that the matter was being handled. Finally the defeated father took his screaming spawn out of the comparment. I never know what he did but a few moments later the kid returned and was very quiet. This method was followed by three other fathers and soon we had our much needed silence. However, I know for a fact that these kids were merely recharging their battery for another, more brutal, assault. And as always, I was right.