Nurture This

Last night, after realizing we’re now going on week three of having nothing edible in our apartment other than pet food, Avery and I figured it’d be a good time to re-affirm how broke we are. We were standing in front of the wall-o-yogurt looking at fat content to price ratios when a kid went running full force into our shopping cart and then dropped like a rock. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, with the soundtrack of Avery saying “Daaaayummm” rounding out the experience, and finished with Avery and me doing the kind of laugh that sneaks out when you are desperately attempting to not laugh at all because of the seriousness of the situation. The kids mother wasn’t paying enough attention so as to realize her kid was running on a trajectory ending in our shopping cart, but she was all eyes and ears when she heard us laugh at her fallen, precious, little angel. Naturally, prior to this juncture of the evening, she was doing the stereotypical ignoring of her out of control children with intermittent pleas/yelling for the brats to stop behaving like a wankers.

The kid drops, the kid screams, Avery and I do the don’t-laugh laugh, and Mummy comes running over to the kid, then looks at Avery and me who are very obviously holding back huge smiles and barrels of laughs, scoffs, and proceeds to yell at us for running our shopping cart into her child. Not a smart move. It’s never a good thing to accuse people of your mistakes in public, and it’s really not good to accuse people who are a mélange of emotions none of which are on the side of decent or good, and Avery and I were in foul, foul, foul moods. What do you expect? We had $65.00 to feed ourselves for the next 3 weeks. And people wonder why we’re skinny.

Shitty Mum: “You should watch where you’re going. My God, I think he’s got a concussion.”
Avery: “We weren’t going anywhere, our cart wasn’t moving. We were just standing here when your kid ran into the cart.”
Shitty Mum: “Well you should have moved the cart so he wouldn’t run into it!”
Me: “Well, you should have been watching your kid.”
Shitty Mum: “I have two other kids to watch after too, what are you two looking at?”
Avery: “Your kid drop like a rock to the ground.”
Me: “They aren’t our kids, they aren’t our responsibility.”
Shitty Mum, after giving Avery the evil eye: “Well you could have a little decency, you know? To help others out.”
Me: “We already missed that opportunity, seeing as you procreated.”
Shitty Mum: “You two have a lot of nerve telling me I’m an unfit mother.”
Avery: “Well, if our opinion doesn’t matter, we can call Child Protective Services to verify your mothering abilities.”
Me: “You know what, Avery? Out of our decency and our desire to help others out, we should call them. I’m sure once we tell them she was ignoring her child until he was potentially seriously injured they’ll be very interested.”
Shitty Mum: “You two are crazy.”
Avery, after pulling his cell out and waving it in her face: “It’s a phone call, or you shut up and keep moving. You decide.”

She kept moving.