The day before Easter, I was at the supermarket which was crowded with ham and chocolate bunny shoppers. Among the other customers was a mom who had a three-year girl in the cart’s seat and a five-year-old boy riding in the basket. Every ten seconds or so, the boy reached up and poked his sister in the back causing her to emit a soul-piercing shriek at the top of her considerable lungs. Mom, who was presumably suffering from adaptive catatonia, or alternatively had just undergone an elective lobotomy, never said a single word. Dead-faced, she plodded on.
Every
time that little girl shrieked, you could feel the entire market suffer a
collective seizure. If she were doing
that at home too, no wonder Mom went for the lobotomy. The older brother, meanwhile, snickered
deliciously every time his sister sent nerve-shattering 100-decibel shock waves
through the store. I don’t think there was a single patron in there who didn’t
fantasize grabbing the five-year-old by the shoulders and yelling “LEAVE HER
ALONE!!” followed by leaning into the face of the little girl and bellowing, “AND
YOU! SHUT THE F UP!”
However,
if anyone should cut this woman some slack, it should be me. I remember only too well what a holy terror
my older son was in a supermarket.
Rory
loved the supermarket. So many possibilities! So little time! Even as a toddler, Rory somehow managed to
maneuver a half-gallon glass container of apple juice over the edge of the cart, thrilling at the CRASH! SPLOOSH! it made as
glass and apple juice went everywhere.
When
Henry was born, having two kids in the cart didn’t leave a whole lot of room
for groceries. Like the five-year-old at Easter, Rory lost no opportunities to
harass Henry, especially delighting in creating landslides of canned goods that
would hopefully crush Henry to death in his little infant seat and return us to
what Rory considered the halcyon days of a single child family.
One
day, Rory just wouldn’t stop tormenting Henry.
There’s not a whole lot of time-out opportunities in a grocery
cart. Fed up, I finally grabbed him,
whacked him once on his little tush and said, “I believe I said LEAVE HIM
ALONE.” An 60-ish woman in the produce
aisle saw this and went berserk, insisting on following me around the store
proclaiming loudly, “Did you see what the woman did? She STRUCK her child! That woman has no business being a
mother! Someone should take those kids
away from her!”
At
that moment, I would have been happy to hand her Rory with the written proviso
that she’d never bring him back, as I saw a definite Ransom of Red Chief plot
in this scenario. I couldn’t get out of
there fast enough. So maybe the
catatonic Mom had the right idea, even if it was excruciating for the rest of
us.
Rory
didn’t stop his reign of retail terror on supermarket employees and his mother,
however. At seven, he managed to bury
Henry in a six foot floor display of stuffing mix. At eight, he poked holes in an entire display
of pricey vine-ripened tomatoes with a caramel apple stick, relegating us to
weeks of tomato sauce-inspired menus.
When he was nine, I couldn’t help but notice one
day that everyone in the market was smiling at me. I thought, “Why have I never noticed what a
friendly place this is!” I smiled
back. I subsequently discovered – but
not nearly soon enough - that Rory had stuck a bunch of “100% real beef”
stickers from hamburger packages on my rear.
The
irony, of course, was that BK (Before Kids) I’d always had these lovely
fantasies about taking my children to the supermarket, how I’d teach them about
nutrition as I subtly guided them to choose the healthier breakfast cereals,
how I’d let them pick between two vegetables for dinner, how they’d help load
up the cart with cans of soup on special and we’d get cupcakes as treats with
the savings, an early education in economics.
It would be so much fun!
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