You Have a Baby... In a Bar!

Look at you!

There’s a bar in our neighborhood with a large enclosed outdoor seating area that on any given weekend afternoon is packed with Uppababy and Numa strollers sidled up to picnic tables like sailboats in a harbor. Toddlers run around shrieking, competing for french fry remnants on the ground with the menagerie of dogs. The parents are relaxed.

It’s loud there. Adult voices are almost drowned out by the voices of very small children. The last few times I’ve gone with my husband, baby, and dog, when I’ve gotten home, I feel it in my vocal chords. Everybody is yelling in order to be heard. The kids are yelling. The dogs are yelling. The adults are yelling. None of the patrons without kids seem annoyed by this; in fact, it’s well-understood that until the sun goes down on weekends, this is a Baby Bar.

I love this bar. I did not think that I’d be a “takes a baby to a bar” parent, but I am. We can walk to it. Even if we end up having to get up and leave after half an hour because our plus one is crying like she may have pooped her pants, drinking an alcoholic beverage in the sun makes me feel a little more like a person.

In Wisconsin where I grew up, it was legal for parents to not only take their children of any age to bars, but to order them alcohol (still is). During my summers waitressing, I didn’t see any parents attempting to procure Jameson for, say, their first grader, but I did see plenty of children running around like happy hour was recess. Taking kids to bars in Wisconsin is part of the culture, which can be best summarized as “drunk, loves the Packers, skeptical of therapy.”

Despite the general cultural acceptability, however, my parents weren’t big into having us spend time in bars. My dad said it was because he didn’t want us “hanging out with dirtbags,” but I think the truth was that my dad enjoyed going to bars and socializing with his hunting buddies, and he didn’t want his mellow harshed by having his own children running around and constantly bugging him for more quarters to play Tapper, and my mom didn’t particularly care for washing the smell of cigarette smoke out of child-sized clothing.

In the 2002 Reese Witherspoon vehicle Sweet Home Alabama, there’s a scene where our almost-awful heroine Melanie (fancy city lady, eats only sushi, cannot walk on dirt on account of her heels are too pointy and high, flashbulbs, turtlenecks, job requires headset and twirling around on office chairs, always in a rush, shiny hair) returns to her Alabama hometown (small, dirty, Yee-haw, every surface is made of gravel, braids, plaid button down shirts, rocking chairs on front porches, everybody’s job is to swing hammers around or make quilts at a relaxed pace, nobody speaks with the same accent because Hollywood is sloppy about getting the details correct when it depicts rural places). There, Melanie must attend to some unfinished business (love with an actor-handsome man who is somehow not the biggest slut in town; again, Hollywood is not great at rural accuracy). Melanie reconnects with some old classmates at a bar. One of them (played by Melanie Lynskey!) introduces Melanie to her baby, and Reese-as-Melanie replies, “Look at you! You have a baby…. In a bar.”

This moment was meant to illustrate the disparity between Melanie’s fanciness and her old classmate’s yokeldom. That doesn’t quite seem right anymore. When that movie was released 20 years ago, taking a baby to a bar was a reliable enough shorthand for lowbrow parental behavior one might see exhibited in a backward place like Alabama or Wisconsin (the Alabama of the North). But now, drop into a random bar in any urban neighborhood trendy with upwardly mobile parents on certain days during certain times and you’re likely to find a veritable stroller parking lot. No Reese Witherspoons will show up and declare “You have a baby… at a bar.” The meaning of the act has changed.

I believe that the existence of the “baby bar” isn’t new, but among a certain ilk (college educated, living in a major city, politically liberal, high income or creative field), the practice has become more acceptable in recent years due to a few things. First, the end of smoking in bars. Cigarette smoke and babies aren’t a good combination. Second, the proliferation of drinking outdoors. With no ceilings, the sound of kids yelling and babies being babies goes up and out into the daylight and doesn’t bounce around all over annoying the patrons who aren’t there with kids. Third, the fact that parents in the aforementioned demographic are older than their parents were. Most of us have spent a decade or more pre-child socializing successfully at bars and we therefore (mostly) understand how to be conscientious about how our actions are affecting other people’s.

This third tenet also explains why not every bar is a “baby bar.” There are places where kids are welcome and make sense, and places where they don’t. Down the street from the bar I love, there’s another great bar, although I don’t go there much anymore. It’s dark, extremely loud and smells like leather, spilled beer and industrial disinfectant. I have seen a three-legged dog there and a cat that looks like he’s been to war. I’ve never seen a baby there. It’s not a Baby Bar, and nobody is trying to make it a baby bar. It’s a bar for people who want to hang out with other adults, and that’s just fine.

I’m not a parent who believes that every space should be “kid-friendly” and I especially don’t think every space should be baby friendly, just as I don’t think it’s appropriate for horny singles to meet and mate at Chuck E. Cheese like it’s the Union Pool bathroom circa 2007.

But I’m also thankful for the hours that this one bar in my neighborhood becomes a baby bar. I’m glad there are places with picnic tables and ample stroller parking and places for parents to relax for a second, taking comfort in the fact that for that hour or half hour, their past and future selves can sit down together and have a beer.

Screengrab from Sweet Home Alabama/ Buena Vista Pictures