This letter to the editor was in my hometown paper this morning.
Parents should seize teachable moments
Recently, while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I noticed a mother and two restless, preschool-age children.
She tried to interest them in some magazines to no avail. She should have brought their own storybooks, or some simple toys. She could have used that time to teach them how to count or to say the alphabet or to recite nursery rhymes or Bible verses. [emphasis mine]
Parents let too many teachable moments slide by, lost to eternity. How sad!
Nina M.
Decatur
Ahem. A-HEM. Well.
There’s just not much more I can add to that.
I know that I personally never feel more encouraged as a parent than when I face, you know, JUDGMENT FROM A COMPLETE STRANGER. I mean, that frazzled mama might have been up all night with two sick babies (or sick as a dog herself), at which point I doubt flashcards were at the top of her to-do list.
And I certainly don’t want to bash the woman who wrote the letter – she was just speaking her mind, as she is completely entitled to do – but, um, gosh. Wow.
If she had been bold and rude enough to speak those words to MY face, I might have invited her to walk a mile in my puke-stained house-shoes, then politely told her to… :-)
Whatever happened to just gossiping about those kinds of things at the beauty shop or at the coffee klatsch? ;) (spelling?) LOL
People don’t care anymore, they just get all in your face with personal, rude comments and questions. I’m afraid common decency is an endangered species……..Sigh……..
Okay, I’ve thought about this all afternoon, and here’s what I think bugs me about it: the tone. The writer could have expressed her concerns in an encouraging way. But she made it a moral issue and, in my opinion, took the self-righteous road. We could launch a what-a-mother-should-do contest tomorrow, and you know who would win? Nobody. Because that kind of stuff doesn’t do anything but pit women against each other.
About a year ago I was dealing with a lot – A LOT – of stuff personally. And someone who was at my house made a pretty rudely worded comment about how I needed to get my carpet cleaned. MY CARPET…at a time when I was as emotionally exhausted as I have ever been. I finally worked up the nerve to talk to the person about it, and I said, “Yes, I need to get my carpet cleaned. But you were so focused on my circumstances that you completely missed seeing my heart.”
So when I think about that mama in the waiting room – I feel like the letter writer judged the mama’s circumstances without knowing her heart. And that’s the biggest reason why it bothers me.
I’ve put far too much thought into this. :-) So The End.
I say that while we’re in “The Metro” this weekend, we should drive to Decatur with Alex in tow, find Nina M., and act like those obnoxious mamas who ENUNCIATE LOUDLY AND SLOWLY while talking or reading to their children. She might change her tune.
Shoot, I’ll bet she doesn’t even HAVE children. And, I know this because her comments sound like something I would have said.
It’s easy to be an expert on a subject you know nothing about. :)
I know I’ve certainly rolled my eyes a time or nine when I felt like a mama didn’t have control of her children. And I have been “that mama” in Target who’s practically pinching a plug in my child and talking to him through my gritted teeth. Some parenting days are better than others – that is true for EVERYBODY. And like Diane said, that’s always gonna be fodder for beauty shop talk. But a letter to the newspaper? I don’t get it. Is that constructive criticism and I’m just reading it the wrong way?
Like I said, I don’t want to bash the letter writer. She is completely entitled to her opinion. The whole thing just struck me as odd.
Well, you don’t have to bash her. I’m Big Sister, so I’ll bash her for you. :)
1. She probably doesn’t have enough to do (unlike the mama she wrote about).
2. She probably doesn’t have any friends, which is why she had to write the newspaper and complain.
3. She is getting very few high fives and lots of hang-up calls today.
4. She should pick her battles more carefully.
5. She appears to be an uninformed, ill-mannered busybody.
Some people are just mean-spirited, and don’t want to change. I know someone will know who said this, but it escapes me right now…..”There is none so blind as he who will not see.” I’m pretty sure Ray Stevens quotes it in “Everything Is Beautiful”, and it is so true sometimes.
There are some people and attitudes that just make me shake my head in puzzlement.
There’s just no need to kid-glove about this woman. She’s entitled to her opinion, and I’m entitled to mine, which is: she’s way out of line and needs to shut the heck up and mind her own business. She has no idea how much time that woman spends educating her child, nor does she know what the woman’s circumstances may have been before she walked in that doctor’s office. Shut it!