BrandiBlog

Today I was “That Mom”.  You know who I’m talking about.  “That Mom” is the one whose child goes completely berserk in public and everyone gives her looks like, “Jeez, can’t you control your kid?” or, “Wow, you have absolutely NO parenting skills, do you?” You know you’ve all given those looks before.  I have a million times.  However, today it was a whole new experience being on the receiving end.

I should have known better than to drag my 13 month old son out of the house after the morning that we had.   He refused to take his morning nap, ripped the covers off of our Netflix movies, threw every toy he owned all over our living room, refused to eat anything other than chunks of pears and goldfish crackers and spent a good portion of the a.m. shaking his head, telling me, “No” and slapping at me.  Those things SHOULD have been a hint of what was to come.

However, I had things that had to get done.  It’s just one of the evils of being a working mom.  So I got him dressed (while he was standing and pulling my hair) and then wrestled him into his carseat in my CR-V.  As I drove to Costco, he kicked the back of my seat and screamed, “Da-da-da!!” at the top of his lungs.  When I went to get him out of the car, he blew raspberries at me.

Once inside Costco, that child proceeded to throw temper tantrum after temper tantrum.  First he wanted my car keys.  Then he wanted an X-Box.  He totally lost it when he saw the little old lady handing out samples of salsa.  As we went through the check-out line, he grabbed one of the dividers that one places between their items and the person before them.  He didn’t want to give that sucker up for anything.  I had to distract him by giving him my keys again.

Not being a sane person, I decided to brave the grocery store next.  After all, I only needed a couple of items, not to mention that I bought him a churro and some lemonade at Costco, so he was on a sugar high and seemed to be in good spirits again.

This was yet another mistake in my mistake filled day.  After about 5 minutes in Fry’s Market he decided that he no longer enjoyed riding in a shopping cart.  To my amazement, he stood up in the basket and tried to jump out!  I kept telling him, “No no, baby.  Sit down,” as customers walked by and glared at me for “allowing” my child to stand in the basket.  As if I had any choice!  And every time I would sit him back down he would start screeching.  His shrill scream would make anyone around me turn and glare.  Nice.

So I decided to get him out of the basket and hold him instead.  This resulted in Ryan scratching my face (enough so that I started bleeding), ripping my glasses off of my face in .004582 seconds and throwing my only hope for eyesight down the aisle.  Then he arched his back and tried to wiggle out of my arms.  The disapproving stares in my direction continued.

So I booked it to the check-out area and somehow managed to unload my groceries onto the conveyor belt with one hand while trying to hold a squirming, screaming banshee.  The cashier, my only sympathizer, told me, “Well, he sure is cute.”  It was at this moment that I noticed that he was smiling at her and had a face covered in sugar and cinnamon, remnants of his churro lunch.

Yeah, I was That Mom.  The one with a screaming, dirty-faced kid who wants to base jump from the shopping cart.  For some reason I now feel like I need to apologize to all of those moms before me who I judged and wished evil things upon for having an unruly child in public and failing to control them.  That karma thing sure can be a bitch, huh?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Family, Food, Life, Motherhood. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.