I get it, I’m pregnant and holding onto the hands of a toddler, but seriously, the only people who have the right to call me mom, are my children.
Mom, mama, mommy, mother; all these titles I carry proudly, but they’re not names just anybody can call me, including middle-aged men whom I’ve never met in my life. And so the story goes…
As I am sure some of you caught wind of my mini meltdown I had last week (30% legit and 70% hormone-induced) when a perfect stranger hollered out his truck window at me in a mall parking lot asking where the closest toy store was. This was not where I had the problem, I’m not bothered by the fact he had me pegged as a woman who had children (hello! 6 months pregnant over here and a shower was still on my days “to-do” list), nor did I care that he left the conversation as abruptly as he started it. Oh no! What left me a fuming mess is how he got my attention in the first place.
Hey! Mom, where’s the closest Toys r’ Us ’round here?
I should’ve ignored the bastard and kept walking, I should’ve looked down at Sofia and said “silly man thinks I’m his mom”, but honestly I wanted to see what this piece-of-work was all about. I turned around to see a man in his late 40’s, slicked back hair, driving a escalate, hanging out his window collecting his Big Mac meal after having misjudged the Mcdonalds drive-thru.
I blanked. I’m one of those people who has the best rebuttal 1-hour post confrontation. What I would’ve said and what I actually said are two very different things and because of it I lay awake a night wishing I could go back to that very moment and tell him what I really thought of the way he got my attention. I mean whatever happen to “Excuse me?” or “May I ask you a question?” or even “Hello! Sorry to bother you but…” all these conversation starters are what I thought were common knowledge, but apparently I’m wrong. You don’t see me stating the obvious when I meet new people, I mean could you imagine if I had spoken to him in this very same way?
Hi there mid-life crisis with bad hair, the closest Toys r’ Us is about 4 km down Lougheed!
A total exaggeration, a little cruel and not quite the same, but you get my point. You do not have the right to call me mom unless I in fact am your mother. These names like mom, dad, nana, papa, they’re all very special and in some cases very difficult to obtain, so throwing them around like they’re slang can be very disrespectful, especially to a pregnant woman in this ridiculous heat-wave. I wish I had said something more along these lines, but instead I stared in shock and replied in a warm motherly-way, “Not in this mall sir, but down Lougheed by the IKEA you’ll find it.”
Leave a Reply