As we rifled through the size 10-12 girls’ T-shirts at H & M, her voice carried thick across the racks and hit square in our backs.
“WOULD YOU STOP YELLING?!”
“That’s slightly ironic,” I said to Sici.
“What’s ironic?” J asked.
“It’s when someone says or does something and then tells someone else not to do it, and it doesn’t make sense,” Sici explained.
I looked over in the direction of the deep-throated yell and saw a large woman in a bright pink shirt and grown-out bleached blonde ponytail, picking through children’s clothes. Her gaze was set on the rack, and her mouth turned down at the corners.
A boy of about eight with tired eyes stood out of her arm’s reach, and a little ponytailed girl of around five stood with her back to us, closer to her mother’s side.
I hoped her explosion was that moment known by most mothers at the very edge of losing it, when we hear our words escape bitter and ugly and step back from the edge.
Step back from the edge, I thought.
But I’ve known times I didn’t step back from the edge, and I feared that for her, for them. Here, in front of all these people to see their shame. I sensed it might be coming, and I wondered if she is like this here, what is she like at home?
“If you DON’T get off that FLOOR, I’m GOING TO….” she roared and then trailed off in fiercely whispered rage as she bent over her daughter, attracting the stares of my girls and glances between shoppers. I was afraid to look at the woman for fear of what she might do or say to me, or mine.
I heard the woman’s voice soften and looked over to see her holding up and smiling at a girls’ shirt.
“How cute,” she cooed.
She yanked at her daughter’s arm, yelling again, and I suddenly needed all three of my daughters beside me, pulled them close from racks and started praying. “God help her find a place of self-control and peace. God, help her children.”
She seemed ready to strike them at any moment, and all I knew to do was pray.
“I told you GET UP!” she screamed.
“It is not OK for adults to treat children that way,” I said to my girls, their eyes wide and confused. “It is never OK.”
I wondered if I should tell somebody, call someone.
Finally ready, I said, “Girls, let’s go,” and we walked to the register so we could pay for our purchases and get out.
I felt guilty with the freedom to leave, having done nothing. These children with no way out, drowning in her tides.
We walked up to the counter, and I heard her voice sharp behind us, “Stand next to me!” and “I bought you these clothes, and you’re whining?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my girls watching her.
Look away, I wanted to tell them. Look away.
What if instead I were fearless and could look her dead in the eye and say, “Stop it! Just stop it!” or ask, “What are you doing to these precious children?” Or speak a word — what word — that would snap her to tears, to calm or to memories of being a girl herself in that long buried and afraid place.
But I swiped my debit card, took the bag, grabbed my girls’ hands, and we left.
I never truly looked in those children’s faces.
My heart raced, my stomach lurched.
As we walked through the mall, I said, “That woman must have had a hard life, and I’m sure that’s made her angry. She probably hasn’t been treated well herself, but there is no excuse for treating children that way. It’s the job of adults to keep kids safe.”
I wanted to keep talking, try to allay their fears, but there was no way to make this make sense. This grownup so out of control, so clearly unsafe.
As we walked, I kept thinking about the boy’s sidelong glance and the girl’s little back and the terror it must be to live in that house.
I thought of the times I have scared my own children with wild eyes and pointed fingers and a voice I knew must sit scary in the space around them. I thought of the times I’ve wanted to pull my words back into my body and feel the pain of them again and again because I didn’t want them to live in my angry tide.
At times, I feel acutely the stirrings of anger misplaced and myself on the edge, and as much as I wanted to judge this woman, I realized part of me is her.
I have the capacity to harm. The capacity to do damage. Every day, moment after moment a choice to bless or to curse. To recognize my limitations, know my weakness, cry out. Breathe in love, receive love, give love. Or not.
Mostly, I choose well. But I fail — how I fail — and my girls feel my failures.
And for these children?
I have known them. Awash in their parents’ pain and fear, trying to walk themselves from the edge. These children, eyes gradually dimming, as they look for something, someone to cling to. Some reason for hope.
After visiting a few more stores in search of a late summer swimsuit, we found our way to a discount department store. With no success, I took the girls’ hands in mine to leave and heard her again. She was in the middle of the women’s clothing rack, screaming at one of her children.
I turned to the security guard, standing at the store’s entrance and felt I needed to say something before I walked out.
“I don’t know what you can do in terms of child protection, but I saw this woman in the mall earlier,” I said. “I didn’t see her strike her kids, but she’s continued to yell at them, and I feel like she’s on the edge. I feel like she could do something to harm them at any time.”
I struggled to know what to say. “Would you please watch her while she’s here?”
“I will. Thank you,” he said.
Then my girls and I — we left the store.
“It’s the job of adults to protect children,” I told them.
And we walked close.
And I prayed.
And it didn’t feel like enough.
Today, would you send up a prayer for these children and this mother?
Connecting through the power of stories written, spoken and lived
Ashley I get this post and the double edge of it- that it can be us and we can watch it too. I think the first reaction is to somehow be defensive or judging. To react with anger or somehow to distance oneself. I remember earlier on in my parenting days reading a similar piece about this type of situation and the response was illuminating The person offered up help in an easy diffusing way. I am not sure how to do that- how to approach the mother and offer a break, a moment for her to catch her breath- really I think that would take a sense of calm finesse, a steady hand. And I know when I have either been close to the edge or witnessed it like you it is not a calm place. It is a panicked place. But I thought it interesting to try to help the Mom in that situation. Watch the kids? Hold some bags? Entertain a crying child for a moment? Help her load her car with groceries while she strapped kids in car seats? I am not sure I have the answers. I understand your feeling of not doing enough but starting with our own children and our own lives is always right.
Oh Ashley, I feel your pain:
To witness, but not be able to affect.
That feeling of inadequacy for not being able to “fix it”.
The pain of seeing your children suffer from witnessing outright cruelty.
The self denial of your desire to nurture that woman’s children as if they were your own.
But all that is balanced in almost Newtonian fashion, by your recognition of that horrific plight and the ripples that spread outward from you in a healing way. In the immediate, you did what you could to lessen the trauma to your children. You taught them a positive lesson, even if one tempered with pain, as unfortunately, many important ones in life are. And I’m quite sure your children will come through this -because of your protection- stronger and even healthier than ever.
But almost as importantly, you have enacted as you know, an important force through calling for prayer. We are all reeds in the wind of the universe, and our prayers are in the wind. You have done your best to protect those children, may God look after them, and their Mother.
Don how eloquently you spoke to this! Thank you so much! (with love from your sister!)
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
Dearest Ashley – I’m sitting here, rattled, shaken, tears welled up and stomach an empty pit of pain. One anguishing irony after another. A woman able to coo sweetly at a child’s shirt and grab hard a child’s little arm. But the great anguish is in the moments … All the moments, turned into years that countless children live in terror. What a horrible and almost paralyzingly helpless experience for you and yours – and what a pile of painful truths to tell. It needed to be written, and I know you knew that. When we feel helpless in a situation with nothing to do but call on God, we do. (And i stand with you in prayer for these and all the children growing up in a dark tide of terror – and for all of us whose anger seizes control of our mouths and bodies.)
But don’t we as individuals – and a society – need to ACT too? (I’m grateful you had a chance to when again you met up with her screaming in yet another store along her terrible shopping spree.)
But can we please talk about this? Can we have words at the ready? Does someone out there have words to speak to an angry parent? We’ve all experienced these times when a parent is on the edge in front of us and their children are cowering in fear and shame, so dont we need to be prepared to speak or do something Next time? How do we defend the children without further angering the parent? How can we diffuse a fiery situation? Or at least, how can we TRY? Pray… and what else????
Thank you Ashley for sharing this with us…I know it was so very hard. Bless you for your most tender of hearts…and for your uncompromising truth-telling…
Ashley,
After reading your post, I can see why you left with your children in tow. I want to point out that this may be a moment to touch on the point that this is an example of another facet of sin: that this parent, in trying to care for her children, was mixing good intentions with evil. Only evil comes from evil, no matter how we might mean it for good. In your situation, I think you could not have done more yourself, other than call DHS, considering your own children were present and needed to be kept safe.
However, during your reflection, may you consider what you may have done if you were alone and saw that woman? Although you may not have been able to stop the woman from emotionally abusing her children… that by offering “to help”, or telling the woman it was “wrong”(no matter how clutzy or imperfectly), you would have called attention to the sin. The children with her would have received the message that this adult’s behavior was wrong, which is a huge distinction in a situation like this. When no one does anything in a situation like this, it makes the sin normal, cloaks it, as though “nothing is wrong”. The children learn that it is normal to be treated this way, it is normal, and no one will care enough to change it. In confronting the woman, you might have sown a seed of hope in the children, even if you may have received some harsh words from the mom, but the kids would have gotten the message that they were worth standing up for. As it stands, it was more important for everyone else to take care of their own business. The safety of those children with that woman was _worth _less_ than our own personal risk of being emotionally hurt or offended momentarily. That, to me, is also a sin.
Ashley: I experienced this similar situation years ago when I was washing our comforter in a laundromat (I just needed the front loader!) and there was this woman there with bags and bags of clothes and 3 very tired, not super cooperative children at her side and she was angry. And so, she took it out on her kids. And then I went to that place of feeling helpless and so uncomfortable and not knowing what to say or do because I was certain that if I said ANYTHING that it would only lead to more abuse, verbal and/or physical. Finally a man in this crowded place said what we all wanted/dreaded to say. She responded by saying something crass and rude and grabbed her clothes (some of them still not clean) and hauled her children out the door kicking and screaming. I prayed for them, too – ALL of them – because I recognized how hard it would be to have her life – even if only for that particular day of doing loads and loads of laundry in a public space and me wishing SO much for something different for me and my children… I have thought about that woman and her children more times than I can count over the years and it happened more than 12 years ago. In my prayers for her and her children, I also give thanks for all that I have been given – starting with a family who showered me with love, and then I re-commit to try and do the same for my own children. Sometimes I’m great, sometimes…
I SO appreciate the grace you showed this woman. As a parent of a child with special needs (which is often exhausting and very frustrating and not necessarily something adults can know just by looking) it’s nice to know there are some adults out there that have grace when you have a bad day. And I echo your prayers for this family. And ask you pray the same for mine. That I would continue to learn how to be the adult and not another child in my household.
If you are welcoming suggestions, what to do or say, how’s this?:
Approach the woman, gently smile, be respectful of her space, quietly introduce yourself, ask “How may I support you right now? One woman to another, one mother to another. You seem to be having a particularly bad day. We all have bad days. Is there something I can do to help you?”
This woman is used to scaring people and that makes her feel powerful. Her defense is to scare others so she can pretend she’s not scared herself.
Love is stronger than fear. The Holy Spirit is not afraid of her, God loves her. Do you think she ever avails herself of that unconditional love?
We get to be “Jesus with skin on” to those who have not encountered unconditional love. We get to be strong and courageous because He is with us to confront others who are mistreating His children. She was mistreated too, so she has learned how to bully. But where will she learn Love?
It’s messy, but it’s worth taking a chance. God is on our side.
Susan, thank you for your thoughts. I’m so appreciative that you chose to comment. I learned so much from your offering. Blessings to you…
That is a heart breaking situation, but I know that prayer must have helped. That woman does not deserve those precious gifts from God. I have to admit that Doc and I were in a similar situation many years ago, and Doc went up and talked to a person just like that. I stood back, embarrassed (not grateful, as I should have been). I never asked him what he said, but for the rest of the time that we were present, no outbreaks. That took a lot of courage, and I could not have done it. Glad you told the Security Guard. Prayer and more prayer is what those children need. I love you Ashley!
Prayer is mighty. I also appreciate Doc’s courage. I am so encouraged by that and by the thoughts of others on how to step into a place of protection in compassion.
I respect how you handled it. I agree with spree, we must be ready & willing to do/say something when witnessing a similar scenario. Praying as well . . .