Yesterday, I found herself where I’d never expected to be: on Team Meddling Moms in a public place trying to protect a strange toddler from an even stranger mom intent on creating a traumatic memory for the little terrified girl.

Mr. W and I took Allie to a large chain retail store to buy baby wipes and sand toys (bucket, spade, etc). While there, we heard a kid wail. That’s nothing new, and we moved on. The wailing continued. I turned, and saw a little toddler girl at the end of our aisle turning slowly in a circle, looking around, crying. Other women had paused and were looking at her, talking to each other. I thought that surely, with her crying that loudly, the mom would find her little girl. She was way too young to be far from her mom. Other moms watching must’ve been thinking the same thing, because people just kind of stood around, keeping an eye on the girl, and waited. Mr. W started pushing Allie away in the shopping cart, and I started to follow, both of us looking back toward the girl, still wandering, still sobbing. “Go take care of that,” he shooed me.

I walked up to the girl, knelt down, and said, “Are you looking for your mommy?” She nodded, crying so hard she couldn’t talk. I decided to take her to the front so I could ask a cashier or the customer service people to make an announcement on the intercom. She looked so bewildered that I just picked her up. She quieted down, although she was still sobbing quietly. “What’s your mommy’s name?” I asked her. She didn’t answer. I asked again, wondering if she didn’t understand English, although I didn’t know enough Spanish to try that. One of the other women who had stopped asked me what I was going to do. I said I was bringing her to the front to have her mom paged on intercom.

Halfway down that section, a woman approached me and said, “Oh, she’s just –” and waved her hand dismissively.
I looked at her without understanding. “I’m sorry?”
“She’s just –” She gestured again, kind of rolling her eyes, as if to say the girl was acting up for no reason.
“Is this your daughter?” I asked.
“Yes.” The woman made no attempt to take the girl from me, and I looked at the girl dubiously, who also made no attempt to reach for the woman. Unsure of what to do, I put the girl down, and she was quiet now, and followed the woman, so I walked away. I noticed when I returned to my aisle that the women who had been watching were STILL watching, and heard the girl start wailing again. Since I had turned into my aisle and couldn’t see what was happening, the older woman who’d asked me what I was planning to do with the girl said to me, “She’s just telling her, ‘Go, go away, I don’t want you with me.’ She’s waving the girl off.”
I frowned. “What? Why would she do that?” The wailing was sounding hysterical again.
“She’s still doing it,” the woman said, watching something out of my view. “She’s saying, ‘Go away, go.'” The woman imitated the gesture of lifting her arm forward and making a shooing motion with her wrist, pointing away from herself. “She keeps walking away from the little girl.” I looked, and the little girl was once again walking by herself, turning in circles, looking bewildered, wailing. The older woman beelined for the mom. “I’m going to say something to her. This is really making me mad.” I couldn’t see the confrontation, but I watched other women still standing as spectators and gawking. The older woman eventually came back, found me, and said that the mom put the girl in her shopping cart now. “She didn’t want to do it, but she did.” Everything was quiet now.
“Why would she want to do this to her daughter here? The girl’s, what, three?”
“I wouldn’t say she’s even that old. Two, maybe.” Geez.
“I’m glad you said something,” I told her.

I later saw the mom pushing her shopping cart with the now calm toddler in the basket. There was an older girl also there, teen or just pre-teen. I feel like maybe the mom felt like she was punishing the toddler, who maybe didn’t to follow or didn’t want to hold her hand or something, so the mom was doing the overly-dramatic, “Fine then, if you don’t want to be by me, then go away.” She probably thinks she’s teaching the girl a lesson, or she’s immaturely retaliating against the girl’s uncooperation, but I don’t believe this kind of parenting is effective. At this age, the girl’s just terrified and unsure of what to do with her mother, her perceived lifeline, rejecting her and withholding love and security from her. The toddler followed because she didn’t know what else to do, was afraid to approach too closely because she was being continuously rejected, and cried because she was and felt lost. Flashback to me following my mom doing the exact same thing, crying, at one point on my knees begging for forgiveness and even kowtowing and swearing I loved her as my mom either turned her back or looked way coldly, and my sick fear of abandonment. Many times I’ve chased after her as she told me to go away, begging her to take me with her. I must’ve been between ages 4-6, way older than this girl. I wonder if the little girl at the store will remember this, too.

When I returned to Allie, she was quiet and had been observing, wide-eyed. She had seen the crying girl first, before the girl had gotten that hysterical, and had pointed the girl out to me, saying, “Baby.” I kissed my little girl on her fuzzy head, and hoped that she would always be this happy and secure.