Officer Superhero - MULTIPLYING - Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary

Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary (2016)

Part III. MULTIPLYING

Chapter 28. Officer Superhero

It’s December 23 and I’m at Target with Tish and Amma. We’ve made it through the shopping part and we’re in the checkout line. I can see the Promised Land, which is: We’re Done Shopping, Let’s Go Back Home.

I watch Amma notice a pack of Gummi Worms. Her eyes widen. I brace for chaos. She grabs the worms, shows them to me with tears in her eyes, and says, “I need dese worms!” I say, “Yep. That’s the magic Target spell. It makes me think I need all this junk, too. The Target spell is why you’re not going to college, baby. No Gummi Worms. Put them down.”

There is no way to convey the drama that was unleashed on poor unsuspecting Target immediately following the word down.

Amma threw herself onto the filthy floor and screamed like a person who maybe just found out that her entire family died. Amma’s particular tantrum style is that she chooses one phrase to repeat 7 million times at 7 million decibels until everyone around her seriously considers homicide or suicide. On this day, she chose, “I SO HUNGWY ! I SO FIRSTY !” (SKULL-SPLITTING SCREAM.) “I SO HUNGWY ! I SO FIRSTY !” (SKULL-SPLITTING SCREAM.)

This was a long, crowded line. And every time the line scootched up, I had to grab Amma’s hood and drag her forward a few feet while she kicked and screamed, like I do with my luggage in the security lines at the airport. And then Tish started crying because it was all so ridiculous. So I gritted my teeth and made my scariest face at Tish and growled STOP at her like some kind of movie monster, but this sort of thing does not tend to calm down a child. So she cried harder. People started moving away from us, and shoppers were actually stopping by our aisle to stare. I was sweating like I was in a sauna, and wishing the “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” song that was on repeat would just end. With the kids jinglebelling and everyone telling you, be of good cheer! Right. My experience exactly.

Up until this point, I had kept my head down, but it seemed time to offer my best beleaguered, apologetic, what are you gonna do? looks to the other shoppers, in hopes of receiving some sympathetic looks in return.

But when I finally looked up, I realized with mounting discomfort that there weren’t going to be any sympathetic looks. Everyone was staring at me. Every. One. One elderly couple looked so disturbed that the grandmother had her hand over her mouth and was holding tight to her husband’s arm. At first it appeared to be an effort to shield herself from my rabid animals. I thought, I hear ya lady, they scare me too. But then I realized that she wasn’t looking disapprovingly at them; she was looking disapprovingly at me. I locked eyes with her, and without subtlety, she looked down at my clothes, then to my cart, and then away.

So I did the same thing. Down at myself, then to the cart. Oooooooohhhh, I thought. Shoot.

My Lyme was back, and I’d been sick for a little while. The day before had been a bad Lymie day, and so was the day before that, so I may have forgotten to shower or brush my hair. For forty-eight hours. And also, when I looked down I noticed that I still had on my pajama top. Which apparently I had tucked in to my ripped jeans. Like seventh grade. I looked bad. Not a little bad—offensively, aggressively bad. Also, here is what was in my cart: six large bottles of wine and curtain rods. It looked like I planned to create a wine bong. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if my smallest child would have stopped screaming: “I SO HUNGWY, I SO FIRSTY!”

And since I was so tired and in such a state of self-pity, I couldn’t even bring myself to feign sympathy toward my starving, parched child on the floor. Because I wasn’t sympathetic, not even a little bit. I definitely remembered feeding her the previous day. Faker.

I resigned myself to suffer through. I stopped trying to help the girls at all. Just left Amma there on the floor screaming and Tish beside her crying and prayed the line would move faster. I am certain that even the atheists in that line were praying it would move faster.

All of a sudden, a uniformed police officer started walking toward us. At first I was alarmed and defensive. But as he stopped in front of me, he smiled warmly and winked.

He looked down at the girls and said, “May I ?”

I was not sure what he was asking exactly, but I allowed myself to hope that he would arrest them and take them away. So I nodded.

The police officer patted Amma on the head gently. She looked up at him and stopped mid-scream. She stood up. Tish fell silent and grabbed Amma’s hand. All of a sudden they became a pair of grubby little soldiers. At attention, eyes shining, terrified.

The officer said, “Hello, girls. Have you two ever heard of ‘disturbing the peace’?”

They shook their little heads no.

He smiled and continued, “Well, that means that your mama and all of these people are trying to shop in peace, and you are disturbing them, and you’re not allowed to. Can you try to be more peaceful?”

They nodded their little heads yes.

The officer stood back up and smiled at me. I tried really hard to show my gratitude by smiling back.

I noticed that the girls grabbed each other in a bear hug and held on for dear life. They had lived to die another day.

He said, “Being a parent. It’s a tough gig sometimes.”

For some reason, I was suddenly desperate to be perceived by him as something other than a struggling mom, so I blurted out, “I’m also a writer.”

He looked genuinely interested and said, “Really? What do you write?”

“Lots of things. Mostly a blog.”

“What’s it about?”

“Parenting, I guess.”

His eyes twinkled, and he grinned and said teasingly, “Oh. Does anybody read it?”

And I said, “A few. Mostly for laughs, though. Not for, well, advice. Obviously.”

I miraculously found the energy and ability and space and breath to giggle.

And my officer smiled and said the following:

“You know, my wife and I raised six kids, and I think that’s actually the only parenting advice worth a damn. Just try to keep laughing. Try to keep laughing. It’s good advice. You’re doing good, Mom.”

Then he tipped his hat to me and my girls, and walked away.

In the end, only kindness matters. Thank you, Officer Superhero. Merry Christmas.

The girls were silent until halfway home from Target when Tish announced loudly, I can’t believe we almost went to jail. We better not tell Daddy.”

And I said, “No way. We have to tell him. What if we don’t and then he sees the report on the news tonight?”

Big eyes. More silence.

Joy to the World.