Last Christmas, I did the unthinkable. I waited until the last minute, and I mean very last, to go shopping for gifts. It was Christmas Eve to be exact and it was more an issue of payday convenience than procrastination. So I put on comfortable shoes, strapped my two-year-old into his car seat and cleared the trunk of everything to make room for the bags, including his big bulky stroller, as I planned to just rent one at the mall. That was my first mistake.
After searching and searching for a parking space I found one in the very last row at the far end of the parking lot and we headed inside. I traipsed in and out of store after store pushing my son along in the rented stroller and after over an hour of this, he had begun to grow weary—and whiny. To make matters worse I was out of cash, and so there I was hauling heavy shopping bags, my purse, and pushing a stroller with a cranky two-year-old from one end of the mall to the next in search of an ATM that would relieve my suffering. They were all out of cash too.
Exasperated, I figured both of us had had enough and decided to leave. I headed to guest services located in the middle of the mall to return the stroller. There was only one problem—guest services is near the food court, but I had parked at Sears, which appeared to be at least two football fields away. People as my witness a tired, cranky, shopping-in-the-middle-of-naptime toddler can and will flat out refuse to walk. Clutching huge, heavy shopping bags in both hands I calmly explained to Isaiah that he had no choice but to walk because Mommy could not carry both him and the bags.
Undaunted he still refused to walk and then proceeded to throw a full-blown tantrum right there in the middle of the mall. Busy shoppers stopped to stare and no amount of coaxing would get him to budge. He was tired, and irritable, and also sensing my frustration regarding the ATMs. He was done, okay? I walked a few steps ahead and looked back thinking he would run after me, you know the trick parents use to get their kids to hurry with the “threat” of leaving them behind. It was to no avail. He stuck to his guns and the meltdown proceeded at full blast.
In retrospect, I feared that it was probably not the safest move either, since the mall was so crowded and people were literally running in every direction like some kind of live exercise in the negative rewards of procrastination. I thought someone could have snatched him and ran off. When I relayed the story to my father however, his response was, “Are you kidding? Who’s going to pick up a kid screaming at the top of his lungs? Especially with the two of you in a faceoff.”
