A time out for Annalie and Mom on a rough day…taken February 7, 2008

Today I was at the pottery studio, painting the prize for the lucky winner of Jill’s pottery lottery. While I was there a mom came in with two young kids, a boy about 5 and a girl about 3. The kids were clearly excited, laughing and chattering as they looked over the shelves and chose a dinosaur and a truck. The mom settled them at a table and brought palettes of paint over so they could start.

From there it quickly went downhill. After he dabbed a bit of paint on his dino, the boy pushed it away and said, “I want to paint that car now.” His mom explained that no, they were only painting one thing each because she didn’t have the money to buy more than one. The boy immediately burst into tears, sobbing loudly over and over, “I WANT TO PAINT THE CAAAAAR!”

His mom wasn’t exactly the epitome of patience, but she did her best, gathering her son onto her lap and simultaneously encouraging her daughter and trying to ignore the child wailing in her ear. After a minute or two she reached her breaking point and snapped, “That’s enough, Carter!”

Not that I can entirely blame her. I was sitting at another table ten feet away and I was in no way responsible for the child emitting the noise, and it was getting on my nerves.

The mom brusquely moved Carter to his own chair and crossed the room to get a new sponge for her daughter, dropping the old one in a bowl of water on the table. The girl protested and fished her paint-covered sponge out of the bowl, squeezing it so that painty water splashed and puddled on the table. When the mom came back and saw the mess, “Lucy Rose, NO! What are you doing!? That sponge is all yucky! I thought y’all were mature enough to come paint again, but I guess I was wrong! Am I ever glad your daddy isn’t here to see how naughty you guys are being…” She went on loudly berating her daughter while she sopped up the water with a paper towel.

Meanwhile Carter had gotten up and was trying to take the car he wanted down from the shelf. As his mom leaped over to scold him for that, Lucy ran over to the door and glanced back to see if her mom was watching her. The mom raced over to grab her daughter before she could run out into the mall, and behind her back Carter…well, you get the idea. The kids were clearly not going to cooperate, mom had good and lost her cool, the situation was spiraling out of control.

I sats there painting and listening to all of this tensely, observing from the corner of my eye each time the mom walked away just in case a disaster needed to be averted. (I tend to do that when I’m out in public. If I’m ever at Target and your two-year-old gets away from you and runs wildly down my aisle, I will block his path in a non-scary way till you arrive, panting and disheveled from chasing him. You might thank me or you might give me a dirty look and stalk off yanking your kid by the wrist, but either way I figure I can’t just let him run on by me.) In my head, I was playing the ol’ I-wish-people-wouldn’t-yell-at-their-kids-in-public lecture: Your kids are being a bit difficult, lady, but come on! YOU are the grown-up here. It was Halloween yesterday, they probably went to bed late and are tired!, etc.

Suddenly—literally in the blink of an eye—I teared up and I went from self-righteous to sympathetic. I thought of the times Annalie has melted down in public, and how often I’ve lost my temper with her and said things I regretted. I thought about how sometimes a stranger smiling at me or saying a kind word has been enough to defuse a situation that was threatening to go nuclear.

And I felt compelled to pray. I asked God to give the mom patience with her kids, to help her speak to them in love and not anger. I prayed for peace to cover them and asked for wisdom to know what, if anything, I should say to them.

The freakiest thing happened next. No sooner had I finished my short prayer than everything settled down. It was almost like flipping a switch. The mom stopped snapping and the kids stopped squabbling. The mom calmly told her kids that if they were good till she was done cleaning up the table she would give them each a quarter for a gumball before they left. The kids waited by the gumball machine, studying the contents and telling each other which colors they hoped they’d get.

Now, I believe that there is real power in prayer. I truly do. Even if you’re not a religious person, you have probably read about scientific studies over the years about the link between prayer and pain, or faith and stress. Whether you believe it’s God working miracles or the meditation of prayer or the support system of fellow believers, you have to admit there is something there, right? But still, as a lifelong Christian and someone who prays daily, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had a prayer answered so immediately before my eyes.

Maybe God worked in the mom’s and kids’ hearts, or maybe the prayer calmed me down and they could sense my calmness, and that calmed them down. Whatever the reason, I jumped in. I asked the mom if she needed help clearing her table since her kids were ready to go. She turned me down politely but continued to chat as she worked, saying her kids had been so well-behaved while trick-or-treating the night before she had thought they might be ready for painting pottery. I mentioned the fact that I have a 4-year-old, smiling and rolling my eyes in an I’ve-been-there fashion.

She finished up and said good-bye to me with a friendly wave. She helped her kids put their quarters into the machine (Carter got green and Lucy got pink) and herded them out the door as she asked, “Are you guys hungry? Do you wanna go get some lunch?” The pottery studio was peaceful again.

I’ll admit that as I picked up my paintbrush again I thought, It’s 1 o’clock in the afternoon and those kids haven’t eaten lunch? I’d probably be squirrelly too if I were them! I don’t think I’ll be able to stop judging others in one fell swoop; unfortunately I think it’ll take a lifetime to get rid of that habit. What I do know is that I am not the one who knows what is going on in the hearts of people I see at the mall, at church, or even in my own house.

I am very thankful that God does not judge me based solely on what others can see from the outside. I want to show others the same grace God has shown me. Maybe if I say a prayer whenever I catch myself judging someone, that grace will be easier to show.

No, that is not Troy’s Halloween costume this year. He was just jealous of Jeff’s pretty tiara and earrings, so I picked up this little number for him at the dollar store. It suits him, don’t you think? It brings out the sparkle in his eyes.

Nah, not really. I mean, Troy does wear the tiara well, but it’s not his. It was one of the toys Annalie packed in her bag to play with on the plane trip home from Texas last weekend. She wore it herself for a while. When she got bored with that, she gave it to me to wear. It only lasted about ten seconds on my head before she pulled it asked me to give it back. Then she handed it to Troy.

“Here, Daddy, you put this on. Let me put this blanket around your neck for decoration and…there! Now you can be the princess and I can be the prince!”

“But I’m a boy,” Troy pointed out. “Can’t I be the prince?”

“No, your highness!” Annalie chirped. (For reasons I have not figured out she often employs a sing-songy falsetto when she’s playacting. It gets used most often when she is a baby, dolphin, or cat.) She straightened out Troy’s tiara. “You look so lovely today, your highness! May I have this dance?”

Troy good-naturedly gave in and played along, agreeing he’d love to dance but wondering how they were going to manage that when they had to keep their seat belts on. That was when I got my camera out.

Troy rolled his eyes slightly at me, but he knew there was no way I could be dissuaded. I don’t think he really minded much. After all, he was just being a good dad and making his daughter happy. Nothing to be ashamed of in keeping your kid entertained on a long flight. That’s practically a public service!

Once upon a time Troy and I were at Target doing some household shopping. Troy was almost out of shaving gel, so it was on our list. I was standing in the aisle waiting while Troy opened various cans and sniffed the contents. “I really like the scent of the one I have at home, but I don’t remember what it’s called,” he explained.

“Do you remember what brand it was? The color of the can?” I asked.

“Mmm…not really, they all kinda look alike,” Troy replied. He went on with his task and smelled a couple more shaving gels. Then he hit paydirt.

“This is it! I found it!” He tossed the can into the cart.

“Well, what scent is it? Tell me and I’ll remember,” I said.

Troy grabbed the shaving gel out of the cart and twisted it around so he could read the label. “Let’s see, it’s…unscented?! Oh, man.”

I still tease him about that.