This happened right before we left for camp. The events are a few weeks old, but the sentiment remains – me
On the way home from an afternoon playdate, my five-year-old said she wanted to stop at Goodwill to buy a birthday gift for a friend. As we walked in, a woman approached me with a look of horror on her face. She was staring at my baby stroller, and I thought she was going to tell me I couldn’t bring the stroller in the store.
“She’s not wearing any underwear,” she said loudly, pointing at my 2-yr-old.
“I know,” I replied calmly, though her tone and body language were combative enough to set all my fight-or-flight instincts going. “She peed in them, so I took them off. They’re in my purse.”
“You can see her vagina!” the woman exclaimed, becoming agitated. The toddler in question was wearing a long dress, but the skirt had gotten pushed up to her knees. If you happened to glance at her from the wrong angle, as this woman had, you’d get an eyeful of toddler booty.
I just looked at her. I was tired. It’d been a long day. Why was this woman yelling about my toddler’s vagina?
She reached down, shoved the baby’s skirt into her crotch, then tried to force my daughter’s knees together with her hand.
“We just love it when strangers touch her without asking,” I said.
Now she looked really angry with me. “There are pedophiles who walk through this store!” she told me sternly.
I literally bit my tongue to stop myself from saying, “The only person trying to touch my child in an inappropriate way is you.”
She stormed off. I stood my ground and let my older kid pick out a beaded necklace for her friend while the little one threw a frightened tantrum, waving her hoo-ha all over the store.
All the way home I felt scared. Would someone else approach me about the missing panties? Call the police? Be mean to me in front of my kids?
I was distracted and bad-tempered with the kids during our walk home. I yelled at my older daughter for a silly infraction of rules and compulsively tugged the little one’s skirt down every time she moved in her stroller.
This is one small, concrete example of the cost our culture of fear has for our children. There may or may not have been a pedophile in the Goodwill this afternoon. If there was, my kids were in no danger from that person, as they were constantly within arm’s reach of me in a crowded store.
My kids and I were victimized, though. We were the victims of a woman’s groundless fear of the mythical boogeyman so much as laying eyes on a little girl. In the process, she made us all a little more afraid. She made my baby afraid by touching her inappropriately. She made my five-year-old afraid by confronting her mother aggressively in public. She made me afraid by calling me out for exposing my children to “sexual predators” – the worst thing a mother can do in the popular imagination.
The girls responded by acting out, testing my authority to see who was really in charge of the scene. And I reacted by clamping down in a frightened, authoritarian style. Everyone lost that battle.
Battle? What war do I imagine we’re fighting? It’s not merely a question of kids being free to be kids. At its core, this is about all of us being free to fear less. It’s about the freedom to shrug off a world of “orange alerts” and constant surveillance, to live our lives. Lives that are a little messy and imperfect, but overall safe and fun. Without this freedom, we’re not just more afraid, we’re smaller and meaner. When we accept abusive authority from others, we become a little abusive ourselves, as I did on the walk home when I yelled at my girls.
It’s not like this was a high point in my parenting life. I certainly did not want to be waving my kid around Goodwill half-naked. I was at the end of my day, and my cope.The perfect mom I am in my imagination would have had a diaper bag with an endless supply of clean panties for her toddler. But that wasn’t me. I was tired and out of important things like toddler-size underwear and patience. What I really needed then was an ally, not a frightened, judgemental stranger.
Imagine if instead of physically accosting my girl to cover her up, the woman had winked at me and laughed, or shared a story of the time her own toddler did something similar. Imagine if instead of panicking at the thought of pedophiles lurking behind every rack of used sweaters, she’d felt relaxed, happy and safe in her neighborhood? In my imagination, everyone feeling less fear makes everyone more powerful and joyful, and encourages us to share that power with each other.
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