James' World 2

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Last summer, my husband and I drove with our 4-year-old and 2-year-old to his hometown on the east coast of Canada. We were there to bury his parents, a memorial that had been a long time in the making because of the pandemic. It was a heavy, sometimes magical time that, after a few weeks, took its toll.

On the four-day-long drive back home to Toronto, we pulled a U-Haul full of memories and keepsakes behind our aging Honda, praying nothing would fall off or out or something worse we hadn’t even considered. Our first stop along the way was a small town in Nova Scotia, where we pulled into a restaurant for lunch. We were all sticky from the hot car and tired, emotionally fried from the last three weeks, but the kids were faring surprisingly well.

It was one of those casual, pub-food-type places, where nachos and fried foods littered every table and tinny Top 40 blared from the speakers above the bar. We sat down and ordered quickly, but between the lunch rush and understaffing, our chicken fingers and fries took over an hour to arrive. While we waited, the kids joked around with each other at the table, looked out the window next to our booth, danced in their seats to the music playing over the speaker, and generally entertained themselves during the excruciating wait. Just as we were finishing up, an older couple who had been sitting behind us got up to leave. As they did, the wife got close to me and, in a tone anyone would recognize, told me my kids had ruined their lunch.

I admit: I lost it. I looked up at her, heat spreading across my face, and told her we’d just buried my husband’s parents and maybe she could show a bit of compassion. I regretted saying it immediately. What difference should his grief make to this stranger? And how dare I use it to try to win some hypothetical argument? The woman seemed unfazed. I apologized to my husband, and, thankfully, the kids seemed not to notice that this outburst had anything to do with them. We managed to laugh about it afterward, but that feeling, that itchy mixture of anger, guilt, shame, and resentment, sat like a heavy ball in my stomach the rest of the way home.

I’ve since thought about that interaction more than I want to admit. At any moment, like a shitty magic trick, I can conjure up those exact same emotions. Those maybe ten seconds impacted me, probably forever. And now, as school winds down for the year and parents prepare to scramble to entertain their brood for the next few months, that woman has been on my mind even more. Who has a right to exist, to take up space without judgment or reproach? And if it’s not our kids, some of our most vulnerable, then how can we call ourselves a loving society?

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Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

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