We’re At a Wedding and I’m Seated at the Baby Table!

It’s the seating plan that stings the most. The realisation that, after all the backbreaking toil of packing everything up, strapping your baby to your chest and setting out on a two-and-a-half hour journey, this is who you have been saddled with. Everywhere you look, your interesting childless friends are having interesting conversations with glamorous strangers who somehow aren’t exhausted or coated in saliva. Then you look back to your table. Highchairs. Highchairs everywhere.

You are at a wedding and you are sitting at the baby table. This is your life. Or at least it’s mine. This wasn’t our son’s first wedding – that was a cousin’s ceremony a few months ago, where I sat with my closest family and we centrifuged him around the table in a weird approximation of a Mexican wave so that everyone got to eat at least some of their dinner before it went mouldy – but it was our first wedding at a baby table. And that is an entirely new affair.

More at theguardian.com.