Gonna Shut Your Stroller Down: A Vent

We all have those people we run into from time to time on our commutes. You know who they are: the familiar faces we don’t know personally, but who become embedded in our daily routine. We come to expect that, during the course of the week, we’ll see them a couple of times on Metro. They may have distinctive hair, a sense of style that stands out above the rest, or they may look like a celebrity, and that leads to a nickname that we either share with our significant others or keep to ourselves. However, with my recognizable commuters, most of them don’t have annoying habits that have made them stand out.

Until Stroller Lady came along.

IP and I tend to encounter Stroller Lady frequently. And we don’t run into her on Metro. She walks down East-West Highway on her way to Summit Hills, pushing a stroller that’s of average size. At the end of the day, she walks back up East-Way Highway, maybe heading to the Metro. She is absolutely tiny, has long hair, and an impassive face which my mom would probably label as a sangrona face—just like I apparently have. I have no urge, however, to tell this woman to smile—we all know how I feel about that. What I do want to say to her is this:

“Could you please move the stroller to the side? The sidewalk is built for two-way traffic.”

Because this woman? Likes to push the stroller containing her kid right down the middle of the sidewalk, allowing very little room for anyone passing her to actually stay on the sidewalk.

I call it the “Watch out, people, I have a BABY!” syndrome—the idea that your little one is so precious that the rest of humanity has to defer solely to you and your baby’s comfort level. Your beh-beh is the best and most special and loveliest in the world—of course you’re going to push his or her stroller down the middle of the sidewalk! Junior or Angel (I would say Princess, but I cannot bring myself to do so for various reasons) has to have the maximum amount of space allocated to him or her—people having to get their shoes wet thanks to dewy grass be damned. The BABY! So special!

I hate that attitude. Because it’s not the kid who’s the problem at first—he or she can’t control how much of a space hog his or her mom is—but that attitude is inevitably transferred to the kid at some point, meaning that at another point in time, people are going to have to deal with an obnoxious person who thinks they’re entitled to everything thanks to their parents’ attitudes; they’ll pass it on to their kids, and so forth, and the insufferable attitude continues unabated. Oy.

Parents of the world: your kids are pretty cute. But not so cute that you get to be a rude asshole. You still have to be conscious of social norms and be alert to your surroundings. You don’t get a pass because you procreated. If we decide to have kids and we’re lucky enough to not have trouble conceiving, will I insist that society around me shift to accommodate me? Nah. I’ll work within society, thanks.

What makes it even worse is that the sidewalk isn’t terribly narrow, but Stroller Lady positions the stroller right in the middle so that very little room is left on each side of her. I snagged this picture from Google Maps; the angle at which the Google Van took the picture makes the sidewalk look super narrow, so I don’t want to give you the wrong impression—it’s a decent-sized sidewalk. But not so wide you can drive the Bugaboo down the middle and think people have enough room to walk by you. And given how people dodge the stroller, this lady knows, but doesn’t give a shit. No need to move over and allow space for traffic. Why? Because. She has a BABY!

Guh.

Should IP and I become parents, I’m going to force myself to reread these types of blog entries so that I don’t become as self-centered as Stroller Lady. Because in the end, no one will care about our kids as much as IP and I do (kind of like our wedding), so I hope to impose a minimal amount of stress on people around us. And that includes moving my stroller to the side to allow people to walk comfortably down East-West Highway.

And with that, I leave you with Jonathan Coulton’s Stroller Town.