Commissary Shopping with Children
A little danger lurks...
by Sarah Smiley
If you've recently had your first baby, you are about to experience a military phenomenon so shrouded in mystery and secrecy that it causes even seasoned admirals’ wives to shudder when they think of it. Consider it SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school for new mothers.
Yes, it’s bad. That bad. Real bad. What we're talking about here is going to the commissary … with children.
No one knows exactly why the commissary makes children crazy, but we are learning every day that there is something, an intangible something, about on-base grocery stores that makes children behave as if they have been raised by cavemen.
Stand at the front of your local commissary and you can actually see this phenomenon unfold. Calm mothers enter the store and put their darling children with cute pigtails and denim overalls in the seat of the basket. Several aisles later you will see the crew again. The mother is becoming disheveled. Her shopping list is tattered. Boxes of frozen pizza might slide off the mound of food piled high in her basket.
When she turns to go down another aisle and out of your view, you will find that you can still hear her. She’s yelling: “This is your last warning!" Her kids are yelling back: "He's touching my leg! Make him stop touching my leg!" By the time you see the mother coming to the checkout she’ll look like a different woman altogether; a sweaty, stressed-out mess.
I used to believe the aggravation could be blamed on the automated speaker at the checkout lines which says, "Next please, next please," over and over again, heralding the next lucky shopper through the last hurdle of commissary: the bill.
But now I think the phenomenon likely has a specific purpose. After one to two hours of listening to a baby cry and maneuvering around tight corners with a basket that has items teetering several inches above the sides, no mother, no matter how determined and purposeful she began, cares how much it will cost to get out of the commissary and back into her car. With a defeated look on her face, she will sign a big check and hand it to the cashier, who is smiling because she is also glad the woman and her children are leaving.
And now, here is the weirdest part. Even with all of this, the woman will come back, maybe as soon as two weeks later, and do the whole thing again. Which leads me to believe that there might be an element of amnesia to this phenomenon. To be honest, I'm not sure, as I can't remember the last time I was in the commissary. But I do know I’m going there this week …