Judgmental

Alas, this is a true story ...

My son is a thrill seeker, his body is not apt to give him any warning signals. Worse, if he sits still for too long his body is giving him hardly any signals... so he craves movement, speed, danger...

I am the opposite. I hate speed and the slightest touch or just being moved about frightens me. And such a 'slow mow' as I am... terrible. Looking after my son when he was a toddler  was more than an ordinary challenge for this single mom. 

My son did have his 'safe distance' as all toddlers have... the maximum distance that a child moves away from his mother, when out on the street and not corrected by an overprotective mom.  His safe distance was around 150 meter  [ 492.1259842519685 Feet  :))  ]  And he didn't respond to audio cues, he preferred visual information.  Can you imagine a two year old, not apt to listen and with his back turned towards his mom... How much time would it take to stop him if he was about to do something dangerous? 

Way too much, so that's why I took my son out on a leash, a toddler's leash. Oh, the comment people gave me. From the jokes about him being trained as a dog or us playing horsey, to downright denigrating remarks, that I was being insensitive and cruel. That my kid would learn nothing from this.... 
I just hated this short sightedness of others. How stupid can you be, judging someone else based on such little information,  on looks alone... it marred my shopping trips.



I didn't just take my son out on his leash for shopping, the time when mother's get absorbed in their surrounding and take a risk at neglecting their child. I even took him out like that for our little walks to a nearby 'park'...  an overgrown stretch of grass, with a few large trees, benches and a broad ditch..

On a beautiful autumn day I went to this park, my high spirited child hanging in his harness like a sled dog in training. From a distance I noticed him, with his girl friend.. They were sitting close to one another on the first bench of the park.  I tried to decide on what to do... crossing the street was impossible, too much traffic. I could take the part of the sidewalk that ran past the park instead of through it, but even that was too obvious.. the best thing, I figured, was to walk past as quickly as I could and swallow the remarks about the leash, forgetting about them as quickly as I could. Because no doubt this huge punk with his lugubrious Gothic clothes would make the meanest remarks ever...
I took a deep breath and geared up, which wasn't hard thanks to my son pulling at his leash. 
Yes, I was right... just as I passed the couple, the guy looked away from his girl friend. His eyes first rested on my son, then he looked me in the eye...
"Good for you ma'am, that you use a leash. My mom used it for me and it saved my life".