Which was the source of my confusion. :o
I nursed, and second (or third) what’s being said. It’s not a snipe. For the first few months of nursing, when the baby cried, my breasts began to leak and the letdown did hurt. (Like that scene in Roseanne when Jackie gets married and her baby cries and Jackie leaks through her wedding ensemble… anyone remember that? heh)
I swear they get a mind of their own, because even if I was in the basement doing laundry, I would experience letdown, go upstairs, and discover the baby was crying! My breasts had better hearing than my ears…
But anyway, maybe the woman doesn’t drive at all and going home early without buying groceries would mean wasted cab fare or a long bus ride for nothing, so going out to the car to calm the baby wasn’t even an option at all… who knows, really, but I thought I’d throw that in there because I didn’t own a car when my baby was small and that would have been me, scambling to get everything done by public transportation and cabs…
It’s impossible to tell from a 2nd hand description whether this mother’s reactions were inappropriate or not. It likely would’ve been impossible to tell in person as well.
In general my children were jolly happy babies, but I’m sure there’s been many times when outside observers wondered what kind of awful mother I was (or just wished we would go away). Slightly before a year old (pre-walking)is when they started pitching tantrums on topics such as “I don’t wanna get in the carseat” or " I don’t wanna get out of the carseat" or “I want that lollipop I just saw” or “I don’t want you to carry me, I want to crawl on the filthy floor”.
The only way to deal with this phase is to ignore the tantrums. It really does work, but it’s hard. I’d just grit my teeth and tell myself “One less tantrum when he’s two”
Why at the grocery store? Well with kids it can feel like a such a monumental acheivement to get to the grocery store (implying herculean efforts of dressing, feeding, diaper changing, shoe finding, shoe putting on, shoe putting on again, purse finding, list remembering, etc) that once you actually make it there, quite possibly after putting it off for days, that there is no way you are leaving before you’re done.
Just crying is pretty wussy in the pantheon of “ways your small children can make you look bad in public.” My two boys were born knowing how to throw themselves to the ground while I was trying to hold their hand in a special way that made it look like I thrust them to the ground.
Luckily most of them are also born knowing how to give a gummy drooly smile often enough to keep you from leaving them at the grocery store.
P.S. I breastfed for years and leaked copiously for almost the whole time, but it wasn’t painful or particularly in response to crying after about 4 months old. It certainly didn’t keep me from ignoring a crying baby if I needed to.
Yes, I used to be quite judgemental about stuff like this before I had kids, and even when I had a single newborn. Now that I have two children, and have probably been guilty myself of behavior that made others lift their eyebrows, I’m a bit more tolerant.
Personally speaking, I’d be very reluctant to let a baby shriek in hysterics while I shopped; I’d probably at least try picking the baby up to soothe it while I walked, or maybe I’d take a short break to feed the baby (easier as a nursing mother than as a non-nursing mother, although not exactly a walk in the park either way, especially if you have a full cart that you’d have to leave in the store if you left to go feed). But maybe this mother knows that picking up her baby will only cause him to shriek even louder for some reason, or maybe she just really really needs to get the shopping done for one of the reasons others in the thread have postulated. Who the hell knows?
And yeah, I’ve soaked my shirt in public many a time when my crying baby activated my letdown reflex. Annoying, to say the least, but in my case not actually painful.
In the interest of fighting ignorance, I will point out that not all, in fact not even a majority of women, find the let-down reflex painful. In fact, a huge number of women (myself included) feel no let-down at all and never leak milk.
Assuming that this mother was not breastfeeding because she wasn’t in obvious pain is ignorant. (In the most neutral, “something you didn’t know” sense of the term.)
Not to mention completely irrelavent to the OP.
Just to further hijack the thread, I’ve got a two month old that I exclusively nurse. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten engorged from him crying. I also don’t have problems with let down or leaking, not even right when my milk came in.
Of course I might be a little strange because I never get engorged. The only time my breasts hurt are when it’s cold outside. I know I have plenty of milk too.
To get a little bit back on topic, my son will cry whenever we’re in KMart. I don’t know what exactly it is about that store. I try to sooth him, but nothing works. The minute we’re out the door he stops crying. The people there must think he is the unhappiest baby in the world, but he’s normally such a good happy baby. Funny thing is when we’re in the portrait studio there he doesn’t cry at all.
Maybe it’s the lighting? It’s usually pretty harsh in K-Marts. 
But that is far from universal. I breastfed my daughter and never once felt let down or pain when she cried. Good thing to, because she had those days where there was no consoling her.
(I know other women who shoot milk across the room when the cat meows).
Just after my kids were born, I was in the grocery store by myself (rare reprieve) and there was a father shopping w/his kids, one of whom kept crying “water, water”. It made me so tense that I felt physically ill. I went and found a bottle of water to give the kid, but they’d left by then.
And I’ve leaked around crying babies, my own and others.
OTOH, there have been plenty of times when one or both of mine was making some kind of racket that I’d totally tuned out. Just b/c they do go thru spells when they can’t be consoled, for one reason or another (colic, teething, naptime, general grumpiness). That’s not to say it was good that I quit responding in a given instance, just understandable? Inevitable? So it is possible she just didn’t hear her kid the same way you did.
Taking a squalling kid out in public is something I would only do out of desperation. It’s rather inconsiderate to all parties concerned, but perhaps she didn’t have a choice - her SO could be deployed overseas or something.
A couple I know has two kids. The second kid cried nonstop for pretty much the whole first six months. It was hard on the parents at first, but after a while they just stopped thinking about it. If the kid is crying just for the sake of crying, what are you going to do?
And someday, fessie, your kids will be just a little older, and you’ll have said four times before leaving the house “everyone go potty, everyone get a snack, everyone get a drink.” And everyone will have said they are fine. And you’ll have snacks and water in the car (because you will have learned that just because they are fine now, doesn’t mean five minutes from now it won’t be different). And you’ll run into the store as fast as you can on your way somewhere and one of your kids will start whining “I’m hungry.” And you will think “I fed you four minutes before we left, you are not hungry, you will not starve to death for the five minutes we are in the store” and you’ll say "As soon as we get back into the car, sweetems, momma has goldfish crackers for you. But this will not stop the “I’m hungry. I’m hungry.” And some stranger will throw angry looks your direction since you are obviously starving your children. And when you get to the car and hand over the little tupperware of goldfish crackers, your darling child will start pelting you with them, since they really weren’t hungry to start with and you’ll have to remind yourself that you do love your children and its just a bad day and maybe your husband will come home early and you can sit in the bathtub.
Well meaning strangers are nice, but sometimes my kid’s sippy cup is in my purse and I’m not handing it over because I’ve been pelted in the head with it when I give into the water plea twice today. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I’m a mom; fool me three times and your sippy cup goes in my purse and you can scream your head off.
And lord knows you don’t want to get one of those kids who needs to tour every public restroom with “I haffa go potty!” and then doesn’t because they really just wanted to make sure this one had a toilet in it just like the last 389 public bathrooms you’ve stopped in this week. Because your child won’t die of thirst or hunger in four minutes, but this time they might really have to go potty.
If I’d been at the store another’s baby would have caused my breasts to leak, but I don’t know if it would cause me pain unless I hadn’t breastfed in the past few hours.
But you know, It doesn’t even have to be a baby. I have a cat that howls at night because she wants to go outside (former stray, I won’t let her out) and THAT can cause let-down.
As for the OP, my four month old hates car seats and carriers and will cry if she is forced to sit in one. Usually I shop with her daddy and he’ll carry her in his arms, but sometimes I have to go alone and deal with the crying. It’s hard to ignore but I have to do what I have to do.
Guess it’s my day to catch crap. Dangerosa, I thought the remainder of my post made it clear that I realize kids can’t be truly managed. I was just commiserating with the OP - hearing an upset kid (particularly not your own) can be a physically painful experience.
It can be. I think its worse when its your own - because I always feel “bad mom guilt.” Could there be something I could do to stop this pain? Or if my kids just being a little shit, was it something I did (giving into a tantrum once, could that be the reason?)? How many people is my kids annoying? Can I get out of here in three minutes before I max out on dirty looks? But there is a difference between it being painful and butting in to the point of fetching someone else’s kid water.
Well, look, this particular father was clearly distracted - he had two kids with him, one about 6 and the thirsty 3-yr-old. The younger one had a runny nose & was somewhat congested, frankly he looked feverish. And he was sort of croaking “water, water” in this really pathetic little voice, and Dad was going “um hmmm” back at him. It wasn’t a whine, he didn’t have enough energy. Listening to his voice made me thirsty & my heart started pounding, palms sweaty. Shoot, I’m thirsty right now remembering.
There is a school of thought that says that if you do everything right, your children won’t cry.
For some reason, it seems to be difficult to convince children that this is true.
Dangerosa has it right - the two sources of stress with crying children is the “can’t you control that child” glares and the “I am an unfit parent” guilt. In the immortal words of my cousin - both a five-time mother and a pediatrician - “sometimes, they just cry”.
It is entirely appropriate for people to react to a baby’s cries - it’s hard-wired into our genes. But it doesn’t always mean that there is something wrong either with the mother or the baby.
Parents tend to adjust to a certain level of stress as “normal” - either lack of sleep, house messiness, crying, or the general chaos that small children carry around them like a cloud.
It’s nice of you to be concerned, though.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s correct. But it’s hardly unique. Did you know the Indians were incapable of seeing Columbus’ ships? 
I’ve never read a better description of infant behaviour. You’d think people had never read Dr. Spock. Babies cry. It’s the only way they can communicate, and sometimes what they’re communicating is “I’m tired, or bored, or possibly both or neither, and I’m going to cry.”
My father recently gave me a piece of advice; “Remember, son, that crying is a baby’s best form of physical exercise.”
Crafter_Man:
Well, they did see them. In 1960. For twenty minutes.
Thanks for making me shoot Coca-Cola with Lime out my nose and all over my monitor.