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Take a Walk on the Wildside: Update
Yesterday evening, around 5pm, I was at the nearby Eaton Centre - the biggest mall in Toronto - which is walking distance from my home, and walked into a shoe store. Who do I see but little Jackson and, no, not with his mother, but with the nanny, who had him in a stroller. She was trying on shoes. Jackson was busy with some fast-food beverage of sorts, and some "high-carb" snack.
I walked over and said, "Hello Jackson!" I said to the woman that I was his neighbor from across the street. Then I asked if she was his baby sitter: yes. If he goes to the daycare around the corner from our street: yes. If she stayed in the house for the rest of the day, then she picks him up: yes. I asked fast, and confidently, so she had no choice but to answer. Then I said "bye" and walked away. But I came back, and asked for her name - "Mary Lou," she said, this time a little frightened (was I going to report her?). The woman, as I said before, is Asian, but now her accent verified to me what I'd know all along: that she's a Filipino maid. I looked down at Jackson and wished him a happy afternoon, stroked his head to comfort him, and left. The woman turned around and asked for my name, but I ignored her and walked on.
The whole episode was really depressing. This woman is hauling this toddler, strapped in his stroller and lulled with sugar and snacks, into one of the busiest malls in the country. I rarely go to the Eaton Centre, and when I do, I bee-line to the store, and the item, I want, and try hard to make a quick exit maneuvering through rude and aggressive shoppers who would plough through me if I didn't get out of the way. And the center is not really well designed to manage the flow of people, so it always seems crowded. Imagine pushing a stroller through this environment. Imagine how horrible the view must be like from the young boy's stroller, with crowds of people almost walking into him, and an endless row of boring stores? And as I wrote before, this is a precocious toddler. How numbingly boring it must be for him?
Once again, the evil parents of this child have given up his safety, his upbringing, and even his future (what kind of person will he grow up to be, left to wander around the dangerous, aggressive streets of downtown Toronto so they, specifically the mother, can do whatever they want?).
Would the mother take her son to such a place, during prime shopping hours? Would she take him out so late in the day, when he should be home? There are a few lovely parks around, some only a subway ride away, which are not hard to maneuver with a toddler who can walk, where he can spend an hour or two on slides, swings and sand boxes, rather than get wheeled around a noisy and horribly boring mall.
Shame on them.