A message to marauding mothers

A few years back, I thought I would do Disneyland at Christmas. I had this silly idea that it wouldn’t be as crowded as the summer.

Wrong. It was jam-packed.

But what I remember most about that trip are the baby strollers. I would be walking through the crowd when one would be coming straight at me. Like a Hell’s Angel, those wheels spinning right at me. Not moving left or right, but instead challenging me to a game of chicken.

The worst was when they came up behind you. You couldn’t see or hear them until they were bump, bump, bumping into your legs, impatient and frustrated that you weren’t moving out of the way.

A couple weeks back when the winds were howling, my good friend Jamie and her sister were walking out of a store. Coming at them at a frantic pace, head straight down, not looking right or left (it’s amazing she didn’t get mowed down by a car) was a young mother pushing a stroller. She was in a hurry to get into the store, but wasn’t watching where she was going. Jamie had to do a fast olé to dance out of the way or she would have been smacked by the stroller. Jamie’s sister, the more hot-headed of the two, hollered at the young lady as she flew by, “Watch where you’re going!”

The response? “You get the frick out of my way! I have a fricking baby!” (OK, that’s not exactly what she said, but I gotta keep this clean.)

Well, I could write a whole column about the joy and wonder of a parent talking like that in front of her child. But what really got me was her belief that pushing a baby in a stroller bestowed on her some sort of all-encompassing right of way.

I’ve got six kids. By no means do I think I’m wonder-Dad, but I thought I at least had a pretty good grasp on all the things kids bring into our lives — getting to experience the joy of holidays and new experiences all over again and the satisfaction of seeing them learning. But I never thought that one of the advantages of having children was using them as push bumpers or cattle-catchers. Who knew?

My kids are all older now. The youngest is in third grade and we haven’t had a stroller-sized child in years. But I don’t care. I’m going to start forcing them into a stroller anyway. Maybe once I get him crammed in there, I’ll have my 15-year-old wield an aluminum bat just to really ensure that my baby battering ram is the apex of crowd-parting technology. Or maybe I’ll see if I can get my hands on an angry chimpanzee just for riding in the stroller when I’m out and about. Because I want in on this “outta my way, I have a stroller” rule.

You see a stroller; I see a “Mad Max” apocalypse machine. Maybe put some of those spikes on the wheels like the Romans used on their war chariots. Paint a little Jolly Roger on each side. Hash marks for every person I smack with my baby stroller tallied on the side.

Jokes aside, here’s my proclamation to all the young mothers out there charging around parking lots and stores with their arms fully extended, chugging along at a fast clip with their babies shoved out in front of them. Got a baby? I don’t care! I know you may have this feeling that as a young mother you have obtained some imagined pinnacle within society wherein the rest of us must move aside in reverence for your status as mother, in awe of your stunning achievement at giving birth to a child. Bravo!

But here’s the deal; most of us older people you’re expecting to leap and jump out of the way have been there and done that. We’ve had children, too. Raised them. You and your baby? Yawn. And when we were young and had just one child in a stroller we weren’t trying to exploit them to part the crowd. We aren’t the Red Sea, you aren’t Moses and your baby isn’t your staff. Keep it up and I’ll make sure that when I’m elderly, my kids put me in a wheelchair and ram me into you.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.