Profiling

One thing fascinating about taking a baby out in public: it's a Rorschach test.  The way someone responds to a baby will tell you a lot about them.

Get on a subway in New York with a baby strapped to your chest, and sit down next to someone.  What do they do?

It's not as uniform as I would have predicted in my pre-fatherhood days.  I thought everyone cooed and smiled.  Waved and played peekaboo.  I thought that was the generally agreed upon response to an adorable baby.

But that's not actually how everyone responds.  The range of responses is huuuuuuge.

Some people totally ignore him.  Even when Elliot is looking at them --- even when he reaches out an arm toward their iPhone, even when he shouts at them, they refuse to look over.

But that's rare.  More common are the people who know what the socially appropriate response is, but don't want to enact it.  Some are just nervous talking or gesturing on a quiet subway car filled with sullen commuters.  Others are virtually paralyzed by performance anxiety.  They are torn -- sometimes it's agonizingly obvious --- by competing impulses to act cute for the baby and simultaneously sit quietly in a public place.

Not that I don't understand their dilemma.  It is a little weird when a man in a grey pinstriped suit starts making high squeaky noises at Elliot on the Manhattan-bound 4/5 train.  I love it. . . but it is a little weird.

Young men can sometimes have interesting responses.  Elliot has a habit of staring sullenly at people on the train, even after they smile and coo at him, and certain young guys take this the wrong way.  These guys watch Elliot, and look away, and look back, and fidget, and smile nervously.  I can tell they'd rather just go back to staring at their iPhones, but instead they go out on a limb and say "Hi," and make a waving motion with their hands.

And when Elliot doesn't respond, they kind of die inside.  I can see it.  They were hoping for a big broad toothy adorable baby smile, but they get absolutely nothing, and it's like throwing formaldehyde on them.   I just stand there and watch these dudes wither in front of me, they are so crushed.  I want to reach out and grab them by the shoulder and shout "He's a baby!  He's not some chick you went up to in a bar, man!"

But the demographic I find most fascinating --- the one I have taken to cataloging, the ones I'm on the verge of interviewing --- are women.

I am fairly confident that, based on a woman's initial response to seeing Elliot on the subway, I tell you with a moderate degree of accuracy what that woman's childbearing status is.

Young women, in their teens and 20s, smile at him with this innocent, Aren't Babies Adorable smile.  Also, there's a hint of: One Day I Will Meet a Man Just Like That.  There's no complication in the smile, there's no nostalgia or regret or bittersweetness.  It's all joy.

A woman who has a child, now or in the past, gives us a knowing smile.  There's some of that same Aren't Babies Adorable thing, but there's also a wistfulness: you can see them traveling off in their mind.  Memories are engaged, and there's a sudden desire to go back to that time.  He wasn't such a bad baby, was he?  He had moments like this, quiet and content in his carrier....maybe i should consider....  But that train of thought gets shut down pretty quickly.

There's a category of women who just ignore him, even when he's shouting in their faces.  I lump them in with the Ignorers of any gender I mentioned above.

But in between smiling and ignoring lies a category of women who have a very complicated reaction to Elliot.  They are often in their late thirties or forties, but they can be younger.   These women will look at him and interact, coo, peekaboo, whatever, but there's a sadness to it.   You can tell their hearts are not in it, and you can watch flashes of sorrow come through the ostensible cheerfulness.

I don't want to jump to conclusions about who these women are.   I'm sure they are a heterogeneous group:  they were unable to have children despite trying; they experienced the death of a child; they lost custody of a child.  Or maybe they just chose not to have children and they regret it.

The impulse to interview these women comes out of a desire to answer these questions.  Who are you?  What happened to make you respond to a baby this way?

Of course, I have no evidence to back up any of these conclusions.  I have never actually interviewed anyone I stood next to in a subway car.  I have used the scientific method to confirm exactly zero of these observations.  I acknowledge that everything I've said above could be completely dead wrong.

But Copernicus never got in a spaceship and saw for himself that the earth was round.  He just predicted it.  And he was right.

Is that an egotistical way to end this?