Every time I go through airline security with the kid I get stressed out. The last few times it hasn't been so bad, but the first experience was so rough it has traumatized me forever. All three of us traveled to New York back at the end of March, when the kid had just turned two months old. We had never gone through security with an infant, and while I was psychologically prepared to be force fed breastmilk to prove that it was not, in fact, nitroglycerin, I thought they'd leave the kid alone. Wood was wearing a sleeping baby in a moby wrap when she set her diaper bag and carry-on down on the conveyor belt, and she had removed all metal from her pockets, but the guard flipped out when she tried to go through the metal detector with the baby in the moby wrap. We had to stand there, holding up the whole security line, while I unwrapped about seventeen thousand feet of black cloth in a strangely unerotic rendition of Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow's first sex scene in Shakespeare in Love. It was more like Boris Karloff and Zita Johann in the Mummy. When the moby wrap "bandages" were removed, one did not get the pleasure of viewing Gwyneth Paltrow's privileged little nipples, but an extremely angry, newly-wakened two month old lump of scrumpled face, a devil child that resembled our sweet Juniper. With the moby wrap off, they x-rayed it and insisted that Wood go through the metal detector without the baby, so she handed her to me. When it was my turn to walk through the metal detector, I did so gingerly holding the screaming baby in front of me.

Then the gheri-curled metal detector guard told me it was my duty as a citizen and a patriot to subject myself to secondary screening. I was not surprised. My name must be on a list somewhere, because I get shuffled off to the guy with the wand and sadistic grin just about every time I fly. But there wasn't a secondary-screener ready this time, so Gheri Curl forced me stand with the screaming baby right next to him at the metal detector for 4-5 minutes. Wood was at the end of the security area, helpless. They wouldn't let her come back and take (or even comfort) the baby. I still have crow's feet between my eyes from the looks I was giving that gheri-curled bastard. In retrospect, such looks probably did not help our predicament. Eventually, a dude showed up who could conduct a secondary screening, and he made me take my shoes and belt off and conducted the wand probe of my outline while another guy went through my bags. He then conducted a wand probe of the baby's outline as I held her out by her armpits. She was screaming. Wood broke back through the ranks of security guards and asked if she could hold her baby. "No," said the guy who seemed to be in charge. "The baby needs to be screened as well."

When they were done screening me, they asked if the baby was male or female. Female, I said, and the guy looked bummed. They had to go find a female screener. There was a guy there who confided in me while we waited for the female screener that his boss was a real asshole. Wood asked if she could hold the baby while they waited, and they ordered her outside of the security area. They were deadly serious. A female screener showed up two or three minutes later, and she ordered me to hold the baby up with my arms outstretched. I swear to God she proceeded to pat her down in her little pajamas, as if looking for the little deringer with which Juniper intended to hijack the plane in the name of jihad for the breastfeeding gods. She was screaming in righteous anger, after all, so she must be some kind of militant. Up and down the screener patted the little arms, the small of her back, the legs, up in between her legs and then she was done.

Then, for some reason they had to pat me down (in addition to the wanding), and the woman screener told me that she would hold the baby.

"No," I said.

These are people unaccustomed to having their commands responded to with anything in the negative. "No," I repeated. "If you're done with her, her mother can hold her. You're a stranger and there's no way in hell you're going to hold this baby while this goes on. That cannot be the appropriate procedure." What I wanted to say: "You've got to be out of your fucking mind, Ma'am. That baby is eight weeks old. Her grandparents have hardly held her, and you're just some fat lady at the airport."

To my surprise, the woman relented, and let Wood take the shaking, terrorized baby and nursed her back to calm in the seats where businessmen usually re-tie their ferragamos. I, meanwhile, had to undertake what seemed like a battery of humiliating tests and checks (but which really only lasted a couple more minutes). Still, I felt like I'd been pulled over for drunk driving on the Las Vegas strip and a crowd had gathered to watch me stumble to walk a straight line while touching my nose with alternating forefingers, singing Shakira's latest Spanish-language release. I kept looking around at the other passengers for some sympathy. Surely someone else would think this was all ridiculous. But that's the thing about airports. At airports, people only think about themselves.

When they were finished with me, the lawyer side of me came out and I asked for everyone's name and position and filed a formal complaint with the TSA. I'm sure doing so just put me higher up on their list. We almost missed our flight. We never received an explanation for why we were treated like this. We can only figure Ahmad Chalabi probably told Judith Miller who told Karl Rove who told Dick Cheney that Al Qaida was planning to use infants to take over 737s. It's the only possibility that makes sense.

Ever since then, when we get up to the grouchy little Filipino woman who checks your boarding pass and ID at SFO, my stomach fills with dread. The other day, we approached the same security checkpoint, the same guards, but it all went down without a hitch.

*note* These were not TSA agents that wanded & frisked our two-month old daughter. SFO is one of five airports nationwide that maintained private screeners and security personnel (like before 9/11) that are overseen by the TSA (the screeners are federally trained). The private contractor at SFO is Covenant Aviation Security. The government is debating the effectiveness of using private contractors to conduct airport screening, and current reports indicate that more airports will be using federally-trained private contractors. Republicans love the application of free market theory to airline security just like they do to prisons. Covenant Airport Security has repeatedly been the focus of several high profile investigations, most recently when it cheated to pass "decoy" screenings and when male security agents were using cameras to focus on women's asses and breasts while they waited in the security lines. I am all for aggressively combating potential threats to aviation safety, but I am against putting the keystone kops in charge of that fight. Using a metal detector wand and then frisking a two-month old infant, I think, is just another example of their complete ineptitude.