Mother's Day 2012

I had another smartaleck poem in mind, kind of in the same vein as this past Easter, to both celebrate and mock the holiday in a clean, fun spirit.  That changed this past Friday.

I was working at the register and I had this one lady in line who had only two books to check out.  She had one of those smart phones and was trying to pull up an online coupon that would have saved her 20% and she spent well over twenty minutes trying to find it.  Get this, twenty minutes in line for two stupid books.  I had to keep calling an extra cashier to take care of the other customers because I'd already rung up her order.  All because she couldn't find that online coupon.  I was asking myself why she hadn't just printed it up like every other customer we'd had that day.  It would have saved us a lot of time.

For ten minutes, it was me staring at her, her phone, my register or just anywhere in general.  To say I was bored would be understating the fact.  I wasn't annoyed; in the big scheme of things, this is nothing.  Really, I was getting paid to stand there and wait on her.  Cha-ching!  But I was bored and I wondered why this mattered so much.  I mean, I'm not the greatest with technology in the world but come on!

It went like this for the first ten minutes.  I must have let out a quiet sigh because she finally looked me in the eye, ever so briefly, and said, "Did I mention that I'm getting a divorce?"

Boredom was gone.  "No."

"He finally let me file for divorce this last week."

Let you file?  So for the next ten to fifteen minutes, I just kept asking her questions.  It wasn't my business and I'm not paid to find out about their personal lives, but she brought it up and something told me she wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, about what was going on.  Here's what I learned:

She'd been married to an abusive husband for fifteen years.  They had two sons (and while she never said so, I'm sure he abused them, too.)  She had made excuses, thinking that much of it had been accidental but finally woke up.  She had filed for a restraining order and it would go through in the next day or two.  Until then, she and her boys were spending their nights in the master bedroom.  Her husband had broken through before, so now the door was steel-reinforced and heavily-bolted so the creep couldn't get in.  And the deal with the 20% coupon?  Her husband had got into all of her online accounts and changed the passwords, just to mess with her.  And she's not tech savvy so there was nothing she could do about it right then.

Towards the end of our talk, the line was starting to pick up again.  I felt bad about calling in a cashier again because I was still with the same person for the last twenty minutes.  I asked if she wanted to just delay the transaction until she could get the coupon up.  She decided to just buy the books and come back later with the coupon for something else.

During that, she thanked me for being patient with her.  I wanted to apologize for not being patient at all; I just don't talk all that much.

As I handed her her bag, I needed to say something to let her know I cared.  All I could say was, "Cheer up.  It does get better."

She smiled.  "I know.  Not all at once, but it does."

I doubt I'll ever see her again.  That's life and it bothers me because that's not really what I meant to say.  Or rather convey.  "Cheer up" sounds so trite compared to what she's now going through and may yet have to endure until this monster in her life is banished and the trial has passed onto the next thing.

See, her story is not unique to me.  I've had friends with even worse stories to tell, the abuses and injustices they've had to endure because the men in their lives were fiends and creeps of the worst sort.  Some got out of it; others stayed or found something even worse.

This lady at my register has now joined the first camp, the ones who got out.  That's a rough road to travel but it's worth it in the end and the destination is far better from where she started, not just for herself but for her children, too.  Things usually don't change all at once (miracles do happen once in a while but most of the time, we have to slog through the trenches before we can breathe the clean air.)  What I really wanted to say to her was that it didn't matter that she had stayed fifteen years because that was in the past.  What mattered was what she was doing now, making the best change she could for the family she still had.  I wanted to say, "I'm proud of you.  I wish more were walking the same road you're walking on."

I don't know if that's supposed to be comforting.  But whether or not, it's praiseworthy and she ought to know it.

So for all the good mothers out there making life better for themselves and for their families, Happy Mother's Day!  Make it a good one.