You, With the Face

Hey You….You, with the face. 

I see you.  And I don’t like you very much.

What? You’ve never seen a two year old throw a shoe before? Or a 16 month old poke his brother in the eye with a cookie?  Or a three year old refuse to take one more step until you make his jacket less bumpy?

Maybe you don’t have little kids.  Maybe you forget what it’s like to have little kids.  Maybe you’re just a douche…

Whatever the reason, You, with the face, I want to tell you that it’s an unnecessarily harsh face. 

Because the only possible reason to make that face it to alert me to the fact that you disapprove of whatever me or my kids happen to be doing at that moment. 

Seriously, it’s not just that you think my child should be acting a certain way.  It’s that you want me to KNOW how you feel.  You want me to see your face.  You want me to feel shame. You want me to change my actions in some way to make them less offensive to you. 

Oh ,You! You don’t get it.  You can think I’m a failure as a mother or that my kids are little monsters and guess what?  You can do it all INSIDE YOUR OWN HEAD! Without the face.  You can make comments about my parenting skills to your friends when you get home.  Without the face.  You can vow to never raise your kids that way or rush home and kiss your perfect angel children and thank them for never acting up in public.  All without the face. 

Sometimes when your kids are being wild jerks and running around a store and playing tag in the racks it’s perfectly acceptable to grab them and tell them that the store manager is going to call to police.  And the police are going to take them off to jail.  And there are NO LEGOS in jail. 

And then sometimes after a mom deals with that situation she looks up and sees you.  You, with the face. 

And she has a sudden incredibly strong urge to rip your face off your head.  Because know what your face does?  It makes her burst out into tears in the middle of Target because she’s trying to pack four people for a weekend away for a family wedding and her husband needed last minute pants and her dog sitter just cancelled on her and her kids are terrorizing her life. 

And then there’s your face.  Do you feel proud of your face right now? 

And some other time that same mother might be at a farm with her kids and one of the kids has some gastro-intestinal issues and his underwear does not survive the experience.  And he’s in the single stall public bathroom in the itty bitty store with the delicious donuts and the cute overpriced toy tractors and he’s screaming.  He’s screaming: “WHY ARE YOU THROWING MY UNDERWEAR AWAY! I LOVE MY SCOOBY DOO UNDERWEAR! PUT IT IN YOUR PURSE AND WASH IT WHEN WE GET HOME!”

And that mother is mortified because without a doubt everyone in the five by five foot store can clearly hear what’s going on.  And she hisses through clenched teeth that if her son shuts the hell up about the underwear she will personally hire Scooby Doo himself to come and wrap his furry body around her son’s ass and act as his underwear for a whole month. 

And the poor un-named mother who this happened to last week takes a deep breath and exits the bathroom.  And of course, there you are standing there. You, with the face!

And that mother just happens to look down and notice that, along with your face, you are also sporting a very sizable bump.  And maybe that mother summons all her self-control and does not say “You’ll be here someday too, bitch!”

OK, maybe she secretly hopes and prays that this exact scenario happens to you…but she also hopes that if it does someone will be waiting outside the bathroom door, not with a face, but with an understanding eye or an “Anything I can do to help?”.

So stop it.  Stop making the face.  Us moms are aware of how awful our kids can be.  Your face doesn’t make any difference in their behavior.  We don’t really care if you disapprove of our actions because all we’re trying to do is survive a trip to the grocery store and leave with around the same amount of kids we went in with. 

All your face does is make me want to punch it.  And I can’t punch it. Cause, along with no Legos...there’s no wine in jail either.