Sweet sweat

Some of my most meaningful experiences these days take place while waiting in the supermarket queue. Last week as I approached the quick checkout, one of the girls on duty asked the other whether she knew what had happened with that woman who'd lost her nine year old daughter yesterday. The other woman answered with a flip of her head and a mean-mouthed expression. "Don't know, don't care. If they can't look after their kids, they don't deserve to have them." Then she stalked off.

The one who had asked the question and was just about to serve me, looked at me open-mouthed and I reckon my expression mirrored hers.

Finding my voice, I remarked: "she doesn't have any kids, does she?" And of course the answer was no!

Of course she doesn't. Stupid, mean, nasty bitch. If she did have she would realise that kids always do the thing that's least expected and that it's very easy to 'lose' them in a supermarket or shopping centre and it's only by the grace of God that any of us manage to bring up our kids without serious mishap.

I felt angry, but then I wondered what was behind such unwarranted venom. Perhaps this girl was desperate to have a child and was not able to do so; maybe she'd lost a child to illness or there was some other terrible unhappiness in her life that made her say this thing.

But then again, maybe she was just a know-nothing, mean, nasty piece of work and maybe one day when she does have children she'll realise they are not inanimate objects and they don't always stay where you put them. Even if they do, the unexpected can still happen.

When one of my boys was a baby, I parked him at the front of a shop in his stroller then walked along to the next store and completely forgot for the moment I had a baby! Sure I remembered pretty quickly and ran back filled with guilt and apprehension, but sometimes, particularly as a new mother, your mind is on so many things that you leave that small window of opportunity that bad stuff can pass through.

Another day I 'lost' one of my kids in a K-Mart store. I was frantic running up and down the aisles, asking shop assistants, had a whole search party going only to find him right next to where I'd been. He was hiding under a rack of clothes, quite oblivious to all the fuss - guess he thought he'd found a cool cubby.

Another time I was shopping with someone else and one of the kids got 'lost'. The friend raced straight to the front of the store, looked away down the walkways then stood their ground while I looked. I found the kid and asked my friend why she was just standing there. Her answer made me realise how sensible her action was. "I figured she probably couldn't have got out of the store in that time," she said. "If someone was going to abduct her they would have to come out the front door and if not, she was bound to turn up at the checkout sooner rather than later."

A truly scary thing happened a couple of years ago with my granddaughter that proved to me how easy it would be to become a horrible statistic in a newspaper - one of those stories that makes mothers shiver and thank God it's not their child. We'd had a garage sale that day and put notices up on nearby lamp posts. I'd told the child we'd go far a walk and collect the notices - then I'd gone to the toilet. When I came out she was nowhere to be found. I enquired of mum and dad and others sitting on the back patio but they hadn't seen her, then I did another search of the house - I was getting bad vibes. I asked them again and asked did they think she might have gone off on her own to collect the notices. "No," they said. "She'll just be hiding somewhere in the house." But I decided to walk down the street anyway. There she was all golden curls and fairy wings, dancing merrily back up the street clutching a notice - from the pole on the other side of a fairly busy street.

It only takes a second of inattention in a lifetime of care for tragedy to strike, and when it doesn't strike you, you give thanks, mightily!