"You're driving me crazy!"

After dropping my son off at school this morning, I dragged the girls with me to the grocery store. They weren't overly thrilled with going with me, but they did not complain. They did, however, drive me crazy by not paying attention to where they were walking and either crowded me or tried to run over strangers. Hey, if that's the worst of their behavior when we're out at the store, that's still pretty darn good.

As we walked down the very last aisle before heading to the registers to pay, I saw another mother ahead of us. She was visibly struggling with her two girls. One of her daughters was trying to climb into their cart while the mother tried to pull her back out, and the other daughter did not want to go into the cart, which was where this exceedingly stressed mother clearly wanted her to go. Anyone with at least one functioning eye could see this poor mother shaking with barely supressed rage as she tried to get her offspring situated. As she slammed the younger of the two girls onto her hip to try and push the cart without either girl sitting in it, I worried that she had reached her breaking point.

It's not easy being the mother of two kids under the age of four, and I say that from experience. I pulled alongside this frazzled mother at the same time she shrieked at her daughters, "You're driving me crazy!"

I suppose I could have told her she needed to calm down. I could have told her she was going to hurt the toddler she was angrily trying to cram into the shopping cart. I could have said or done a lot of things to point out what she should have been doing instead of what she was actually doing. I'm sure just about every mother out there has had some well-meaning but absolutely ignorant person tell them things like that. Personally, it drives me even crazier than the kidlets do when people try to tell me what I'm doing wrong when I'm stressed like that. And, let's be honest here. What parent hasn't been that stressed out at one point or another?

Instead, I calmly said to her with a smile, "Gee, that sounds like me about five minutes ago!" I silently willed my offspring to keep their mouths closed, since I had obviously not said anything even remotely resembling that to my daughters. (If memory serves, I had technically just been saying, "Will you please pay attention? You're running me over and I'm getting smushed like a bug!" or words to that effect.) Thankfully, they kept their mouths shut. I strongly suspect I was not the only one who wanted to see how the other mother would react.

It was as if a magic switch flipped and calmed down that flustered mother. She smiled, gently got her one daughter situated in their cart, and commiserated about how kidlets must do this on purpose, because we could all be in and out of the store in just twenty minutes if kidlets simply did what they were told. Any observer could see her relax, and I suspect her children recognized it, too, since they stopped fussing.

Think about it. None of us want others to point out all of our flaws. I did not tell that mother she was overreacting or that she would some day miss these moments. (Yes, I have had older women tell me when I was carrying a kicking, screaming, temper-tantrum mess of a kidlet that I would one day look back on these memories fondly. I resisted the urge to ask them if their adult children had taken them for dementia evaluations. Clearly, they were not right in the head if they assumed I would one day miss such a thing!) Instead, I just admitted I feel like she did sometimes.

I'd like to think that helped.