The thing is that I actually like grocery shopping. It was one of my favorite activities to do with my mom growing up and still is something I make sure to do every time I visit her. My mom taught me that a grocery store is a magical place with foods that can be combined in endless combinations. It’s can be a wonderful amalgamation of cultures, and with the right attitude and perspective, it can be a lot of fun. Some kids talk to their parents when they go to the mall together, out to coffee, or playing golf. My mom and I catch up on life while going grocery shopping.
I’ve enjoy taking my sons grocery shopping and they enjoy it as I do. Ollie knows his way around a grocery store. He is pretty good at picking out fruits and vegetables and understands how most food is shelved and organized. For the most part, I look forward to going grocery shopping as a way to spend time with my children, enjoy the wonder and glory of food and feel a little closer to my mom through this activity even though she lives more than two thousand miles away.
Saturday was a different situation. It was cold. I mean like in the teens cold. We were sandwiched between snowstorms, and I was stressed out about getting grades done for the semester. Ethan and I was a little stir crazy from being in the house all day so I took him to the grocery store with me.
My timing was off. For us to eat at 5:30, meant that I needed to start dinner around 5:00, 5:15 at the latest, and it took about a hour to do groceries. Which meant I needed to be on the road around 4ish, and it around 3:45. Add in driving in the snow and we were running out of time. Those things put me in a bad mood and then I got to the store.
I don’t know why so many people were grocery shopping last Saturday afternoon but the store and parking lot were packed. With limited visibility, parking was an ordeal and walking in the store and seeing how crowded it was only put me in an even worse mood.
Most of the time when I go grocery shopping its during time when the people there know how to “grocery shop.” Usually when it’s crowded there’s people there who don’t fully understand the norms and the dance that is grocery shopping. That definitely the case. People were stopping the carts in inconvenient places, looking for specific items for far too long, and not moving logically down aisles creating grocery cart traffic issues throughout the store.
I was just trying to not crash into other people with my grocery cart and get the shopping done as soon as possible. Then I started noticing something as I was looking down picking out apples. Ethan was having a conversation with a person near us. He’s doing this thing now where he will make a sound like a chirp or a “haa,” wait for you to respond and then say something back. They aren't really words but he’s these sounds to have a back and forth. Ethan was doing this with this person, and as we moved away he waved and giggled with both of his arms.
As we moved through this crowded store, Ethan kept waving at people and starting up conversations. He must of chatted with almost a dozen people. As people talked to him and commented on how cute he was, my bad mood melted away. I started doing what I had always done with Ollie. I began talked to him about what I was getting off the shelves, and helping him learn the names of all of the foods.
Ethan is empathetic, but he didn’t reflect my bad mood. Instead, he decided to be Ethan, joyful, lovely, and doing the best he could to make other people smile and laugh.
Children bring us a lot of different things in life. Sometimes it feels they bring us is stress, but sometimes in difficult moments they bring us joy, and remind us to be a better version of who we are for them and ourselves.
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