Grace in the grocery store
Sometimes things are just broken and there's not much you can do about it.
The jar of roasted red peppers slipped from my hands and shattered on the grocery store floor around my sandaled feet. In my rush to get through checkout before the toddler melted down and back home for the baby’s nap, I clumsily dropped the jar onto the tiles.
“No!” yelled my three-year-old, who shares my condition of having difficulty accepting my mistakes. “You don’t drop that jar. Pick up the peppers and put the jar back together and put it back!” And then he screamed into the pickles and salad dressing aisle. The baby tied against my chest began to scream too. They screamed back and forth for a bit, while I just stood there, noticing the unpleasant sensation of oil leaking between my toes.
That’s when the nearby cashier called out a blessing. “Oh, honey,” she said as she scanned an item, “you just be careful of your feet. Just shake them off,” as she scanned another, “shake that glass off and back up slowly.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t you even worry about it,” she said over the beeping on the belt. “I’ll be right with you when I’m done with this customer.”
I looked down and saw that the top of my foot was bleeding. The three-year-old had calmed down, and was ready to talk. “Why did you do that?” he asked as I patted the blood with an old tissue.
“It was an accident, Bud.”
“But why?”
The cashier called over the intercom, “Clean up in aisle 8. Clean up in aisle 8—broken glass.”
“Mommy’s not perfect,” I said.
Automatic mess-fixers
In a Facebook parenting group I recently read a woman asking for advice on how to deal with a child who kept saying to herself, “You’re a stupid, clumsy girl.” One commenter said, “Pay attention to the way you talk to her. Kids learn their behaviour from others.”
But do they learn all behaviour from others? Or does our sinful nature need to learn a peace beyond understanding, a grace that runs opposite to what we think makes us grow? I do not scream at my child when he breaks things. There is some kind of reptilian terror that emerges when children see their parents hurt. Suddenly their world is in great danger and they are angry and that anger must be directed at the person at fault. And though it was a minor mistake, I was at fault.
I spend about fifty percent of my time right now cleaning up messes without even thinking about it. That is what I do now, who I am. Mother means mess-fixer. And so it irked me to be unable to do anything about this one, with a baby strapped to me and a child whose hand needed to be held. The staff poured in, swept up the broken glass, wiped up the oil and handed me a band-aid. The cashier kept saying, “Oh, sweetie, it’s not your fault,” which it was, and “These things happen,” which they do.
When it can’t be fixed
By the time I made it to the check out, harried and exasperated, the toddler wanted to put items on the conveyor, which was less than helpful. As I was straining over the baby to bag items, the customer behind me said, “Would you like help?” And while I wanted to respond, “No, I’m fine, I’ve got it all together,” my pride had mostly broken with the roasted red pepper jar, so I said, “Yes, thank you so much.”
“I’ve been there,” she said, and began deftly bagging, while adding, “What a good helper you are,” to the three-year-old, and, “Put your shoes on please.” And then she was gone.
I strapped the kids, still crying, into their car seats. As I pressed the gas pedal with my bandaged foot, I thought about how to make this a teachable moment for my child. Then again, perhaps the lesson wasn’t for him. Many of the parenting books I’ve read emphasize restitution rather than punishment: teach your child to restore the thing they’ve damaged rather than punishing them. They need to clean up the food they threw on the floor or fix the thing they broke. But I have yet to read what to do when a thing can’t be fixed, when you need to stand in the knowledge that you made a mistake that can’t be fixed, and you might not even be able to help clean it up. Sometimes things are just broken and there is just grace sweeping in around you over the beeping of groceries scanned on the conveyor belt.
