Spontaneous Combustion Averted

It was 7:35 pm on Sunday night, and Kathy and I were in parental hell.

Parental hell can take many forms, I suppose, but in this case, our hell was sitting in stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge with a tired, hungry, bored, thirsty baby Riley in the backseat screaming her lungs out. We were driving back home from an afternoon barbecue in Richmond -- a drive that normally would take about 30 minutes or so -- but with the Bay Bridge closed and some art festival thing happening in Sausalito, we had been in the car for 1 hour and 45 minutes and counting. Leah and Riley were pretty wiped out and had so far slept most of the way, but Riley woke up just as the Golden Gate Bridge was coming into view, and lemme tell ya, she was PISSED OFF to find out that she was still in the freaking car.

Parents know that their babies have different levels of crying, ranging from impatient whining to mild complaining to indignant exasperation, all the way up the line. Usually, Leah or Riley will start off with a little mild-complainey cry, and gradually work themselves upward on the scale. On this occasion, however, Riley dispensed with the usual protocol and went straight to DefCon 1, the "Riley-Special" cry of agony and anguish, the one that roughly sounds as if we had just left her in a cage with some hungry wolves, and she was screaming "WHY-OH-WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO ME, MOMMY AND DADDY?"

The worst thing was that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We were stopped in wall-to-wall traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge that has no shoulders to pull off on to. Plus the babies' car seats face backward and take up basically the entire back seat of our little Honda Civic, so there was no way to comfort Riley other than to awkwardly try to pat her shin bone and say pointless things like "we're sorry, Riley!" and "everything's going to be okay, Riley!"

And that's just about when Leah started waking up. Yep, we were now totally screwed, and we knew it. Riley's crying was going to scare the crap out of Leah, and then Leah was going to start crying, and then Leah's crying was going to upset Riley even more, which was going to upset Leah more, and on and on and on until the chain reaction caused our Civic to spontaneously burst into flames. I started formulating desperate plans to escape the bridge. Maybe I could jump over the curb and onto the pedestrian walkway! It works sometimes in the movies, doesn't it? There weren't all that many pedestrians on the bridge! Or I could veer into oncoming traffic and dodge cars like in Frogger! I used to be pretty good at that game!

Instead we just waited for the onslaught, because really there was nothing else to do. We just braced ourselves and waited.

Except the onslaught didn't seem to be coming. I listened closer, and through Riley's desperate screams, I could hear Leah quietly babbling in this low soothing voice, like the voice Kathy and I use when we tell bedtime stories. Kind of a calming sing-songy voice, the kind Mr. Rogers used when he was trying to calm down that jittery Mr. McFeeley guy. Leah babbled on and on like this for a solid minute or two, and as she did the most miraculous thing happened. Riley's crying got quieter, then got replaced by those post-crying-sobby-hiccup-things, and then just as we reached the toll plaza, the crying stopped altogether. Silence.

Leah had just talked Riley down. Like a policeman talking down the suicidal man from the ledge.

It was a Labor Day's Eve miracle.

Hey, whaddaya know, sometimes that whole having a twin sister thing pays off.