Are you my mother?

Nothing like a little vision loss to turn an ordinary shopping trip into an adventure. Many blind people ask a clerk for help shopping; since RantWoman can mostly get around stores with no more than her average number of problems running into big people or over small children, usually RantWoman bypasses the help or, when shopping with RantMom, attempts to rely on her for help. The actual dynamics of this are a tale for another adventure. Let us stick to "Are you my mother?"


RantMom has, without asking my permission, turned into a "little old lady." She is neither as little nor as old as many little old ladies (lol's?), but she is a couple inches shorter than her peak height. She has grey hair, which tends to make her blend in really well with white retail shelving and white retail linoleum. She has enough gait, body shape, and clothing preferences in common with other little old white ladies that, well, it is hard to tell them apart especially if one is RantWoman.

Of course, since RantMom and RantWoman are both all grown up we have somewhat lost previous decades' skills in staying together during encounters with massive retail. RantWoman just refuses to keep holding onto RantMom's cart and RantMom feels the same way about anything RantWoman would have. In fact, we both like to wander off and peer at our own stuff without necessarily having to answer questions like "Why on earth are you buying THAT?" Not only have our staying together skills deteriorated, our communications skills which were underdeveloped in the first place, have also sagged. If one of us says we are going to look for something the other may or may not be listening or hearing.

When RantMom lived in MT, RantWoman visited a couple times and trailed along to RantMom's encounters with Big Box retail, defined as monster stores where RantMom had honed pursuit of her preferred purchases to a pretty exact science. RantWoman, being a distractible sort in a new environment was always stopping to look at something or other while RantMom whizzed away. Of course, RantWoman was also a lot less motivated to actually buy anything than RantMom.

Sometimes, rather than try to chase all the LOL's and find the right one, RantWoman would just go stand somewhere near the front checkouts and act tall: if RantWoman cannot find RantMom, then just help RantMom do the reverse. RantMom finally wised up about this after a particularly comical effort to page RantWoman to a place where it would not even have occurred to RantWoman to look.

In Seattle the rules are a little different. Sometimes we are in places where RantWoman and RantMom know different things about how to find our way around. Sometimes RantWoman just does "Are you my mother?"

"Are you my mother?" works just about like the children's story. RantWoman muddles up to a promising-looking shape and is almost to make some bizarre family in-joke when, oops, excuse me, I thought you were someone else. Oops, there goes another form just about the right shape."Are you my mother?" RantWoman does thankfully usually restrain herself from asking out loud, but "Are you my mother?"

Finally, this time RantWoman figured out that RantMom was wearing a purple coat and pushing an orange cart, nothing like anything the other LOL's were pushing.Yes!