As an idiot male, I occasionally get stopped by elderly women to correct my parenting skills.  It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.  And apparently the “Hoboken Society of Nosy Old Ladies” was taking a bus trip to Sams Club yesterday.

This was all partly my fault.  It was after Micah’s naptime and I knew he was cranky.  But I really needed paper towels and milk and thought I might be able to pull off just running inside quickly.

This was not to be.

I was in the store for about 5 minutes when Micah started to fuss.  I tried putting him in the Bjorn, I tried putting him in the cart next to Asher, I tried holding him, but it’s darn near impossible to push one of those beastly carts with one hand.  So eventually I settled on simply putting him in the cart and pushing it as fast as I could through the aisles.

Micah began to fuss, and then he began to cry and before long we had entered the territory of full out sobs.  By this point I’m cruising through the aisles at Mach 2, trying to remember what corner they hide the paper towels in. 

Several little old ladies looked at my sobbing son with pity and looked on the verge of saying something, but I blew past them.  Thank God for arthritis.

But one lady started running after me.

“He’s hurting him!” she said.

(What the heck?)

“He’s hurting him,” she said pointing to my three year old, Asher.  “Don’t hurt your little brother.”

Asher stared at her blankly since he had just been sitting there playing with a bag of bananas.

“He didn’t do anything to him,” I said.  “Micah’s just tired.”

“Well, babies only cry for a reason you know.”

My first thought was, well, I don’t know about that.

“It’s true,” she emphasized.  “Oh no!   Look!  His foot is caught.”

I looked down at his leg which was tucked up under the rail.  “No,” I said.  “He just put it there.”  I gently pushed his leg down and he immediately tucked it back up. 

By this point, my nerves are close to shot from all of the crying and elderly intervention .

“Oh, I think he wants me to pick him up,” she said.  “He can tell I’m being sensitive to his needs.”

That was it.

“Ma’am, I just need to get him home so I can put him to bed.”

“Well, I raised 5 kids and I know that sometimes…”

“Well, I’ve got three” I snapped and started to push the cart away.  Ok! I know the kid is crying.  I also know what I need to do to make him stop and that is get home, and not talk to crazy people.  But clearly my maleness renders me incompetent to make such an assessment.

The lady is still shouting at me from an aisle away as I move toward the checkouts.  Geez Louise, how can I not outrun someone with a hip replacement and SAS shoes.

She corners me as I’m coming around the corner of baked goods and grabs my arm.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to tell you this.”

I’m starting to wonder how inappropriate it is to hit an old woman with a bag of bananas.

“I had five children, but one of them died in a car accident.  And I often think back to how I sometimes neglected her as a child and I would give anything to go back and not do that again.  So whenever I see a child crying, I just have to say something.”

….

………

……………..

ARE YOU FRICKING KIDDING ME?!?

That’s the most depressing story I’ve ever heard and now I feel like absolute crap!  I pick Micah up out of the cart and hold him, which changes the wailing to a snuffling cry.  I then try to steer the 400 pound cart with my left hand – using my pinky as the sole means of turning to the right or left.

I got through the line and managed to get out to the car and load everyone in.  Unfortunately I can’t stop thinking about that horrible old woman and her horrible old story and how damn true it is.

I feel simply terrible.

I suppose a good parent would have ditched Sam’s gone home, put their baby to bed and continued to use old boxer shorts to clean the kitchen counters until new paper towels could be purchased. 

Yeah, Micah does get the shaft sometimes.  When I was home with just Audra, we organized our whole day around her naps.  Her every need was met and she never would have been in a Sam’s an hour past her nap time.  But now we’ve got three kids and three more teens down in the basement and life just isn’t that easy anymore. 

And now I need to carry around with me future guilt about how I would feel if something ever happened to one of my kids. I think what that lady had to say was probably true.  I also think it was horribly mean.  I have enough guilt troubles already without spending time contemplating future hypothetical guilt.

It did make me rethink a little bit how we’ve been living and what, if anything, I could do about it.  I didn’t rethink it so much that I didn’t poke Micah all the way home so he wouldn’t fall asleep in the car, thus ruining his nap, (it was for his own good), but I did think about it.  And I learned a couple of valuable lessons.

1.  It is probably helpful to occasionally view your parenting through the lens of “how would you spend your day, if this was the last day you had.”  (I can tell you one thing.  I wouldn’t have been fretting about cleaning the kitchen counters)

2.  Carry mace.  Those little old ladies are vicious.