wherein Liz is mistaken for a bad mother

[edenfalling]

As I walked home from work this evening, I passed a small girl on a bicycle and her mother who was walking behind her -- or, more accurately, I passed the mother and then the girl and I played leapfrog for a couple blocks.

Near the end of the second block, the mother stopped to talk to someone and the girl, naturally, stopped at the intersection. I crossed it just as a car pulled up on the sidestreet that had a stop sign.

As I reached the other side, a woman's voice said, loudly, "Hey! You! Is that your daughter?"

Since I have no children, it didn't occur to me that I was being addressed.

The woman called again. "Hey! You shouldn't walk ahead of her like that. It isn't safe!"

At this point I turned, wondering what was going on, and discovered a woman leaning out the driver's seat window of the car on the sidestreet to give me a disapproving look.

Apparently the girl's mother was far enough back from the sidestreet, and sufficiently obscured by the shade of trees, that since I had been next to the girl before she stopped her bike, the driver assumed I was the girl's mother.

"She's not mine," I said, and pointed across the street. "Her mother's back there."

"You need to pay attention to her -- it's dangerous not to," the driver said firmly.

"Not my kid! Her mother's back there, talking to someone," I repeated. And I turned around and continued home.

...

On the one hand, it's reassuring to know that people are civic-minded enough to keep an eye out for children in potentially unsafe situations, but on the other hand, it was an extremely odd experience to be scolded for bad parenting when I don't have any kids.

...

I keep forgetting that I'm technically old enough to have a ten-year-old kid, if I had, for goodness only knows what reason, gotten pregnant right out of high school.

Comments

[hamiechi.livejournal.com]

lol, if I were you, I'd walk the girl back to its mom.

[edenfalling]

The girl was waiting safely at the side of the road, so I figured there was no need to do anything.

[rahirah]

I was recently berated by someone for not paying attention to the quail in the road. (What quail? I was looking for, like, cars and people.)

[edenfalling]

I tend to figure that if birds are in the road, they have wings and can fly away. *sigh*

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Street scolds are the bane of parents everywhere. The way I see it, you accidentally did the little girl's mother a good turn.

--Willowgreen, who doesn't believe that a child old enough to ride a bike needs to be within arm's length of a parent at every moment.

[edenfalling]

I think the driver was reacting less to the "kid without parent right next to her" thing -- which is, as you say, not really an issue -- than to the "adult blithely crossing an intersection in front of a car without checking to see if the-kid-I-assume-is-hers is following" thing -- which, if I saw a parent cross a street without noticing she'd lost her child on the way, I might be a little concerned myself.

It's just that the girl was not mine, so the driver's assumption that I was neglecting her failed to hold water. *wry*