Babies Acting Up in Public Places 

When I was a child, I hardly noticed them. In my self-centered teens, I found them to be weirdly amusing objects of ridicule.

In my aspirational and ambitious twenties, I saw them as extremely annoying and unnecessary distractions and saw their parents as inconsiderate and incompetent.

During my thirties, K and I had and raised three babies of our own, and all that disgruntlement and disdain vanished. I developed a blissful ability to tune out entirely to their crying and screaming and go about my work productively.

That superpower stayed with me until my mid-sixties, when I became a grandparent. Since then, I am once again aware of and even alert to the antics of toddlers and babies. And I find everything they do to be adorable – from smiling to giggling to banshee-level screaming.