The Little Commuter : New Jersey Toddler Makes Daily Trip to City With Working Mom

As the sun rises and the train rolls along, a man in pin-stripes sips coffee and reads the Wall Street Journal. Up the aisle, Ashley Resto sucks on a pacifier and “reads” about Mickey’s day at the beach.

Ashley is only 16 months old, but she is one of the 1.4 million people who commute to Manhattan each weekday. For the last 10 months--two-thirds of her life--she has spent almost four hours a day traveling between her house in the suburbs and her day care center in the city.

A growing number of children commute relatively long distances with their parents so they can attend a school or day-care center near a parent’s workplace, but few so young have commuted so far for so long.

Ashley, who travels with her mother, is literally growing up on the train. Since she took up the commuting life she has cut her first teeth, taken her first steps and spoken her first words. She has been weaned off the bottle and begun eating solid food. She had a first birthday party at the Hoboken Terminal.

Ashley’s mother, Shirley Resto, is an administrative assistant who works in lower Manhattan. Each morning she and Ashley, who wears her light brown hair pulled up on top, Pebbles-style, leave their house in Oakland, N.J., and drive to the train station in neighboring Ramsey.

They board the 6:22 local. Shirley flashes her monthly pass, which costs $142--Ashley can ride for free until she’s 5. They pull into Hoboken at 7:13 and Shirley puts Ashley into a stroller for the ride into Manhattan on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson subway and the walk to the day-care center a few blocks from the subway terminal. Mom is usually at her desk by 8.

Shirley and her husband, Bob, work a few blocks from the center, and visit Ashley at lunch time. “If anything goes wrong, I know I’m across the street, not two hours away,” Shirley says. When she gets out of work at 4 p.m., she collects her daughter and the two retrace their steps.

If smiles and giggles are any indication, the kid loves it. “Of course,” says her mother, “she doesn’t know any other way.”

Ashley was born on May 18, 1990, two months after her parents moved to Oakland, 25 miles northwest of New York City. Shirley Resto had to return to her job as an administrative assistant at Standard & Poor’s in five months, but she didn’t want to leave Ashley behind in New Jersey.

Including her commute, Shirley would be spending 12 hours a day away from home. “I’ll never see her,” she told Bob.

Shirley had noticed that Trinity Church, across the street from her office, had a day-care center. The tuition was $750 a month. “I began to think, ‘Why not bring Ashley in with me?’ But when I brought it up to Bob, he said, ‘You are out of your mind.’ ”

Bob had nothing against commuter trains--he’d proposed to Shirley on one four years earlier--but somehow it seemed like a big trip for such a small child. Friends and relatives were skeptical, too; commuting with a child was something you just didn’t do, even though no one was sure exactly why.

Shirley decided she couldn’t afford to respect tradition. “I just can’t leave her in New Jersey,” she told her husband. “I want to take her with me.”

Bob eventually was won over, and the great experiment began in October. Almost immediately Shirley had her doubts. Ashley was teething, and often cried on the train ride home--all 43 minutes’ worth.

There was a particularly messy diaper on a particularly crowded car on a particularly warm afternoon. There was the time Ashley grabbed the nose of a fellow passenger, and the time she threw up on her mother.

But Shirley found an ally--Bill Pagano, the conductor on their train home.

“What they were doing was unusual--people would stare at them--and the mother was scared, you could see it in her eyes,” he says. “That’s when I started monkeying around with the baby, letting her play with my keys and stuff.” Soon, Ashley was greeting him each day with a high-five.

Once, when Ashley was crying, an angry commuter--a Wall Street type, Pagano recalls--asked him, “Can’t you shut that kid up?”

“Mind your own business,” Pagano snapped. “It’s just a baby.”

Shirley, meanwhile, has learned a few tricks herself. She and Ashley sit each day in the same seat, so riders who want to avoid them can. She fills her briefcase with games and books, which she rotates daily. There’s no time for breakfast at home, so she brings along fruit, yogurt and other goodies, but nothing with too much sugar or caffeine.

If no one nearby is sleeping, they sing. Favorites include “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Row, Row, Row.” It’s just like sitting together on the living room couch, Shirley says, except the couch doesn’t sway.

“I know the phrase is overused, but our time on the train is quality time,” Shirley says. “Quality time doesn’t have to be a day at the beach.”

Ashley also enjoys the company of her fellow passengers, such as Pat, the woman who sits in front of them, and John, the guy across the aisle. “Happy day,” Ashley bids them at the terminal.

Although people constantly offer Shirley help, she tries to refuse. “I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. I don’t want to be the poor soul of the train. I say, ‘I’ve got it under control, thank you.’ ”

Her most important coping mechanism, however, is laughter.

“I think the whole thing is pretty funny,” she explains. “It’s pretty funny to see a grown man in a business suit saying, ‘Goo-goo.’ ”