Where is the Isle of Me?

Nothing gets you focused on the right stuff - yourself that is - like the promise of a new pair of shoes. It doesn't take much when you are 5 (or 50). Last night during a trip to Marshalls, the greatest store in the world, my girls and I were there to cruise the shoe department. All business as usual in a retail setting, looking for bargains and nothing less, I was whipping up and down those aisles when I heard 5 year-old Nora (audibly frustrated) say, "Where is the aisle of me?" Well I've been asking that same question for forty-one years. I heard that the folks from Lost may have found it once, but that was just a rumor.

Shopping

How many times have you, as a parent, said "I will never ... again!" Well, today I attempted to shop for shoes for the three of them, and was rewarded with such beastly behavior that I wanted to morph into a cyclone right in the middle of the shoe department. My son was such a spaz that I had no idea how to handle myself, let alone him. It presented one of those moments where you just search around, desperate, finally admitting you've got nothing. Thirty years ago I could have hauled off and hit him for everyone to see. Well, apparently I wasn't born early enough. All I could do was grab his hand, while simultaneously over-enunciating a side-bar lecture into his ear, and march him towards the exit hoping to keep him from escalating the trouble he had already started with his youngest sister. The truth is, I probably will do it again. Sometimes you have to take your children to a store. You either find the strength to quietly persevere or impose a strategy to subdue their awful behavior that actually works.