roar

a few weeks ago my heart felt a feeling that it has not felt before.

let me set the scene for you.

i was at common place with some people i know and some people i don’t….ahem…if it sounds like i’m being a little vague it’s because i am. i am creeping into this little thing called the blogging world and have found friends and strangers telling me they are actually reading what i’m writing. therefore i need to be careful what i say, right? i feel that way right now, my feelings on that may change in the not so distant future. but, for right now i am going to keep the specific details in my (okay, my husband’s, mother’s, sisters and some girlfriends) mind only.

so, back to that common place. a little girl, probably about 3 and half years old, approached my precious first born and they began to chitter chat back and forth. the child’s parents were very close to the hubs and i. we continued to talk with our friends and when caleb turned around to look at brody the girl had just shoved him over. my sweet baby. are you seriously pushing my innocent-never-seen-someone-be-pushed-over-or-even-know-what-pushing-is child over? i know brody thought it was just a joke or some sort of strange game. he did a little laugh and said “whoa baby” and “whoa gracious” about fifteen times, i’m sure.

caleb nudged me and told me what was going on. i immediately told him to just go get him. i didn’t know the child or the parents and didn’t want to go there. so caleb gets up to go get brody and as we look back the girl is, kid you not, pushing him backwards while she’s running and he’s just skidding along with this little scared face i have never ever seen before.

i wanted to scoop my baby up and take away every feeling and inkling of knowledge that he now had about being hurt and being scared. why did he have to be exposed to this already? more importantly, why weren’t the girl’s parents stopping her? seriously. i didn’t want him to know that pushing existed yet. i didn’t want him to be scared that he was going to fall down again. i didn’t want him to think it was okay for someone to do this to him. i didn’t want him to think it was okay for him to do this to someone else.

now, don’t get me wrong. i know i sound like a crazy person and i know very well that pushing and shoving is something most three and four year old will do. i know the girl didn’t really harm brody and i know there will be one day i will be stopping my children from doing this exact thing. but, for the first time, i felt the most overwhelming urge to protect my baby and shield him from all that’s wrong with this world. starting with that first push.

we talked with brody the whole way home about how pushing is not okay. we told him that he can tell someone “please don’t push me” if that happens to him again. we told him we loved him and how we were so sad that he was pushed over, that what the little girl did was wrong. we told him we didn’t want him to push his friends, either.

caleb and i were clearly more upset than he was and, while we were still trying to process that this child would actually, gasp, lay hands on our baby boy, we took him to price chopper and plopped him into the most ginormous blue truck cart. he beamed. i beamed. we pushed him up and down the aisles and got him a balloon, a new ball and a pack of his favorite m&m’s. maybe we went a little overboard but can you blame us?

we wanted to get the pushing girl off our his mind and give him some things that would make his heart happy. why? because we felt for him in a way we had yet to feel.