Life Behind A Young Mother on the Light Rail

I looked up from my list of vocabulary words. Three young women had entered the Sacramento Regional Transit light rail car, one holding a child to her chest. Their conversation contrasted with the relative calm of the other passengers. The woman with the child sat in the seat immediately in front of me, her friends to her right.

The doors closed, the muffled chimes sounded, and we departed north-east toward the American River.

The mother was investigating the source of a smell she had detected. "Oh, I've never seen so much!" she exclaimed. "It is all the way up his butt crack." The little boy was old enough to stand on his own, with short, curly hair and lots of energy. "Don't sit down, honey," the mother exclaimed, "You'll smoosh it; here, sit on your knees." The young boy did not want to sit on his knees and look out the window, so he faced forward and exclaimed, "Bike!" Toward the front of the car, two bikes were visible. "And I didn't bring any wipes, either," the mother exclaimed.

About five minutes passed. "You're shitty," she exclaimed with a smile in her voice. The mother's friend nearest to the aisle, also relatively young, leaned over and viewed the contents of the diaper, laughing.

The young boy then vomited onto the metal backplate of the seat in front of him. The young mother assisted him as her two friends abandoned her for the front of the car. "How can you stand it?" they asked her, to which she responded, "If it wasn't my own, I don't think I could. It's mine though, so I can stand it." She removed her child's tee shirt and proceeded to ask him where it hurt, wiping down his mouth and nose.

The atmosphere of the car changed. The mother's pluck and the plight of her child changed us from strangers to community members. To my right, a young man sat quietly watching. To the front of the seat the mother's two friends had recently vacated, a young man inquired if the mother wanted water from his hydration backpack. "He only has to bite down on the tube," he helpfully offered, to which the mother politely declined, "No thank you; I live only a short ways from the light rail stop; we'll have plenty of water there." Another man two seats forward turned and offered the mother a large tee shirt with which to assist with cleanup. "No thank you," she declined.

The mother's two friends returned from the front of the car, shirts over their noses, to see how the boy was doing. The mother had finished cleaning him. "It must have been the burrito," she said, "It's the oil." Her friend suggested maybe the burrito simply set him off. The mother swiftly rejected the idea. "No, it did not set him off. It was the oil."

Her friend, standing, casually suggested it was OK for me to move. The mother also turned to me, and said with a genuine, but slightly embarrassed, smile, "Feel free to move; there'll be no disrespecting." I thanked her and said I was fine; and I was. The mother slung the child over her shoulder and I smiled briefly when he looked at me, then I went back to my reading, keeping my eyes on the pool on the floor, which moved to and fro with the trains movement, but never within reach of my seat area.

They departed at the Roseville Road station. Two minutes later, we reached the end of the line and everyone in the car disembarked. The car was coincidentally taken out of service.

That was my ride home on the light rail this evening. It is what it is: a young mother, a sick child, her two young, childless friends, and the people traveling with them.