Random People I Remember

Supermarket Tantrum

I saw a small child once at the supermarket. She was with a babysitter who was in the middle of talking. "...we can go find your daddy after this."

Suddenly the little girl froze. Locked up, body tense, she yelled, "No!" Her babysitter paused, with a worried look of apprehension, and they both stood there for a moment in the bread aisle. "No Daddy!" the little girl shouted.

The babysitter paled. "Okay, I get it, no daddy." But it was too late.

"NO! NO DADDY! NO DADDY NO DADDY!" The screaming got increasingly louder, but as I looked at the child, her face bright red and streaming with tears, I recognized something I hadn't felt in a long, long time.

The feelings too great for a body so tiny, she could only stand there and scream. The tantrum dissolved her thoughts into the same phrase over and over and I knew, I knew that little girl was afraid. For whatever reason, the thought of her daddy had locked her into a paralyzing fear she had no idea how to handle. She stood there screaming with fear, unhappiness, and anger, at her condition, at herself, and at her inability to articulate what she wanted and needed. There in the bread aisle of the supermarket she screamed at the cruel world she found herself in, and all the people in it who stood around ignoring her, standing idly by wishing she would just go ahead and shut the fuck up already.

And my mom turned to me and said, "If that were you I would have smacked the living daylight out of you." And I thought, ah. So that's it then. That's the cause.