Sometimes you have this happen: You go to the grocery with your son before baseball practice to stock up for the week, and as you’re pushing two small truckloads of groceries across the parking lot, his cart gets stuck in a grate and tips over, spilling and crushing about ten bags of food. Right in the middle of the driveway in front of the entrance. And the carnage is apparent…. spaghetti sauce oozes forth like blood, covering everything in its path with the smell of pesto and onions- which is fine if you’re at home simmering sauce on the stove, but not quite as fine when you’re in the middle of the Kroger parking lot. The cereal is crushed. The fish is leaking fish juice all over the place. It’s not immediately evident whether there are other casualties, because the “sauce blood” makes everything look like grocery death. But you can’t help but think of the jar of Walt’s BBQ sauce you couldn’t wait to try, the Cholula, the bottle of wine…and is that clear liquid just a rainwater puddle or has the San Pellegrino sprung a pressure leak too??

And your brain scrambles to try to figure out what to do next. After saying “damn” several times (because you’re aware that there is a ten year-old present and what you really want to say is much worse), you start scrambling to get things scooped up and out of the road. You’re using an extra empty grocery bag (where did that even COME from?) to pick up slippery sauce-covered pieces of jar so you don’t get cut, and then leave everything to run and tell a grocery store employee to come out and put some kind of crime scene tape down so cars don’t get their tires slashed. And it’s at that moment that you realize it’s probably past four o’clock and Ryan was supposed to be at baseball by now, but you’re both covered in sauce and not going anywhere anytime soon. And it feels like too much. You want to cry. You want to just throw all the messy, crushed, sauce-covered groceries in the garbage and go crawl into bed.

And then, through the haze, you realize that there was at first one, then two, and now at least four kind strangers helping you gather your messy groceries, issuing words of condolence and questions of, “Are you ok?” And you also notice that your son is silently crying because he thinks he’s ruined everything. And something inside snaps you back into reality. You tell him to get in the car so he doesn’t get cut (he’s wearing flip flops). You thank the nice people profusely for helping, and you put the groceries on top of the blanket you’ve been carrying around in the car for baseball games. You get some napkins out of the glove compartment, wipe as much sauce off your hands as possible and head to practice.

And as you notice the sauce spatters on your son’s baseball pants, and his tear-stained cheeks, you pat him on the leg and quietly say, “If anyone asks, just say, ‘You should see the other guy.’” And when he doesn’t crack a smile, you know it’s bad. So you go into full-on Parent Mode and remind him it’s just groceries and you know it was an accident, and that it could have been either of your carts that tipped over, it just happened to be his. You tell him it’s not a big deal in the whole big scheme of life. You make sure he’s not hurt (it’s hard to tell through the sauce). You keep telling him as many times as he needs to hear it that it’s not his fault, and that you’re not mad, and that it’s really, really, really ok.

He seems a little better but still Charlie Brown walks into practice. You go home and survey the damage, which as suspected isn’t nearly as bad as you feared. By some miracle, the wine is intact. The Cholula and BBQ sauce both survived. The only casualty was one jar (out of three) of Prego. You’ve never rinsed groceries in the sink before, but hey, there’s a first for everything. So, after washing and drying the groceries, wiping the Prego handprints off the back of the car, and filling up a water bottle, you go watch the rest of baseball practice.  And afterward, when the first thing your son says is, “I’m really sorry again, Mom, I didn’t mean to do it,” you can’t wait to tell him the good news… “It was just a jar of sauce, hon.”