I am still angry and confused a week later and wondering what I should or could have done.
Laying hands on your stroller to take your crying baby out of last week’s freezing cold and into the coffee shop you dashed into probably would have gotten me charged, and sadly, with time constraints, I did not think I could stay calm enough to find and confront you and did not know what kind of situation I could create with my boiling white-hot rage.
In other words, I had time to clothesline a neglectful parent, or kick a baby stroller over and keep going, but not enough time for a parenting debate with a total stranger.
I wonder what you’d have said to a cop – “I just had to grab a latte/say hi to a friend/run to the bathroom, officer” as an excuse for abandoning your goddamned child.
Yes, I have done a good job of beating myself up about what I didn’t do or say, could have done or said. I’m still angry, mostly at myself. After having been verbally and physically attacked for less I guess I’m apprehensive these days about confronting strangers, but I should have been late for what I was doing and risked it anyway.
File this under “another apathetic, useless citizen” Bitch.
ps. I’ll say what the guilty parent (who hopefully will read this) should say: I can’t believe I let that happen, and I’ll never do it again.
—with apologies to freezing babies who need to depend on undependable strangers
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2010.
I’m confused by the verbage of this bitch OP. You tried so hard to sound smart and articulate, that I may have missed the point of your story.
Did the parent leave their baby outside alone while they went into a coffee shop?
Andy, I’m hoping as a new parent you have more sense than to leave your baby alone outside in the cold. Especially with temperatures as they were last week.
leaving your baby alone outside in the cold while you get a coffee?
it’s not like it’s a dog or something… I think they’d let you in with a baby.
who does this???
on the other hand, frozen babies do keep longer.
I don’t believe this actually happened. OP is exaggerating or lying.
Condoms.
Yeah it doesn’t ring true. There would be no reason not to bring the stroller inside.
I would think that more people would have noticed this. As such, it MIGHT have made the evening news. The OP is making this up.
i empathize with you. it seems so incredibly difficult to decide what the right thing to do is sometimes. especially since people are so… unwilling to take accountability of their decisions. and become very irate if you try to confront them with the results of their decisions. as if the results of their decisions aren’t the results of their decisions. meaning they think they have no fault in it. even though it was them who created the situation. it’s very strange.
fast foreward 15 years and i’m sure that baby will be doing the same with it’s baby. except with a gun. probably a laser gun. it’s quite terrifying.
IT TAKES ALL KINDS,IT TAKES ALL KINDS.
ooo, laser gun.
by then they should have nuclear-powered, heated hover-strollers.
Frig, doesn’t ANYONE remember that Runaway Train video? Where the mother leaves her kid outside a store for a minute in her stroller and she’s kidnapped?
Not only was it cold, but the baby could’ve been snatched in a second. And then that shitty excuse for a parent would be the first to scream “WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?”
It happened because you’re a dipshit, lady.
I would have done the same thing I did a few years ago at a local bar, where people play machines all day long.
Some idiot left their dog in the car, so I marched into the establishment and announced that whoever owned the dog had 30 seconds to cash out, or I was smashing the window and taking the dog. Some old bitch got up and left, probably because she cared more about her windows than the dog, though. I heard a few weeks later, same thing happened but this time it was a baby, and the cops were called, the woman was babysitting, so it may not have been the parent, at the coffee shop. What would’ve been really good was to take the stroller around the corner and wait to see how the bitch reacted when she came out.
If this is true, I can’t believe no one did anything about it, what a shame!
The other day on my drive home from I witnessed a WTF parenting sight only minutes away from Mic Mac Mall (it’s the most mall I hear), which prompted me to join this feedback.
Walking towards oncoming traffic was a young Mom and her baby. Not on the grassy median, where in fact what I would later deduce was her responsible Baby-Daddy. She had the baby on the actual highway. inches from oncoming cars, which were traveling in excess of 90km in a fucking stroller!
It takes all kinds indeed!
In Denmark it’s actually common to see this – culturally, it’s okay to leave babies in strollers on sidewalks to enjoy the fresh air as you shop and they never worry about the baby’s safety. Could the offender have been from Denmark? Surely it’s perfectly obvious that it’s not acceptable here.
After I learned this, I then saw it on Oprah. They interviewed Danish women. So it’s gotta be true 😉
Nobody puts baby on the corner.
my child would wail if i left her outside to wait. wtf
So, that is when you grab your cellphone, punch in 911, and report an abandoned child. You’re a witness, and if you have any sort of camera on you, even better. What she did couldn’t possibly be legal.
Remember back in tghe 50’s when we sterilized retards? Yea I do . And we stopped doing it ? We shouldn’t have . Prime example right there.
Yea it’s cold out forfsure. But what about leaving your kid also to the fuckin babyrapers and diddlers ? Kidnapperfs? Another retard? SHoulda went in there and kicked that bitch right in the face!! Twice!
When I was a baby, my mom would leave me out in the freezing cold without even a blanket over me for hours while she went shopping at Sobey’s and I turned out perfectly fine. I think you’re obviously over-reacting a bit here, OP.
Reminded me a bit of this scene from Family Guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRj-S8Aklcw