So, if any of you were in the parking lot of the Port Orchard Fred Meyer at 5 PM-ish yesterday, I would like to ask you to forget what you witnessed. I was carefully (carefully, damn it!! Cautious-to-the-point-of-maniacal-paranoia-CAREFULLY) leading my six-year-old from the store to our car. A car suddenly came speeding around the corner towards us, decided they didn't feel like waiting for us to finish crossing the road, and swerved around us, coming within inches (and I mean inches) of hitting Colton. Then they continued speeding down the row of cars like nothing happened. The whole thing was totally intentional and I flipped out.
Which was when, for some reason, my 'parental' instinct was to yell, "HEY, FUCK YOU!!" as loud as humanly possible.
I mean, come on-- "Hey, fuck you"? Not 'hey, watch it' or some other kid-friendly version of what I really wanted to say? Nooo, instead let's yell 'fuck you' to a potentially crazy stranger with my child present. You know what else I could have done? I could have kept my verbal-diarrhea-inclined mouth shut and taken down a license plate number so the crazy-ass driver wouldn't end up in some other parking lot trying to run down someone else's kid.
At some point, I realized I was still standing in the middle of the road with my hands quite belatedly covering Colton's ears, my heart still in my throat from someone almost hitting my son, and my normally very reserved demeanor completely freaking out that everyone around me just heard me scream at a car . Might not seem like too big a deal to some people, but what I hate even more than conflict is attention. Especially negative attention. So, I avoided eye contact with anyone and managed to get us to the car in one piece, meanwhile scripting in my head how I was going to explain all of this to Colton.
After I loaded the groceries into the car and did my Walk of Shame to the cart return (because I CAN'T yell obscenities AND leave my cart stranded in the same parking lot on the same day), a car pulled up next to us and a man asked if we were okay and said he saw us almost get hit. That made me feel better, a little bit less like an isolated crazy person. Or the Incredible Hulk. HULK... GETTING... ANGRY!!!!
HULK SMASH!
ReplyDeleteI know you feel my pain, Heidi. Of course, you wouldn't have done it in the first place. :0)
ReplyDeleteI don't know... I might not have, but only because I couldn't get my barrings fast enough. One of those things I would have thought about later and WISHED I had said :p
ReplyDeleteI would probably have done the same thing so I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree....it's hard to know what you would do in a case like that, you don't know until it happens how you would react. I probably would have added one word onto that phrase...a**hole.
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