Reminder that I don't belong...

this past saturday chiyang conducted the quarterly men's gathering for our church. so instead of staying home, i decided to take cody to the nearby world renowned, scottsdale fashion square.

for those who don't know where this is, it's a shopping center in prime real estate, where in the winter, celebrity sightings are not uncommon. it's actually quite a wonderful place to go to stay out of the heat. there are floors and floors of shops to browse through, kill time, and stay cool. and the best part of it all, there is a play area for children to burn off some extra energy after being pushed around in their stroller for the most part of mom's shopping.

cody and i got to the play area at around 1pm. it was prime time, since most mom's would have gotten done with their shopping and lunch and now just wanted about 30 mins of "playtime" for their kids to "work it all off" before the wonderous nap-in-the-car drive home. needless to say, there are many children in the play area. cody had a blast.

and just like clock-work, at 1:30pm, the play area started clearing out. suddenly there were no more than 6 kids in the play area. things had calmed down, and i was thankful for it. all this time, i had been worried about cody climbing up the "mountain" to slide down the "waterfalls". they have this feature that's about 4 1/2 feet high, where kids use a "bridge" to climb up to the top of the "mountain", which is kind of like lake tahoe (there's "water" in the crater), and slide down the "waterfalls" (two slides, one steeper than the other). it's actually a very fun. but it become scary when 5 kids are trying to come down at once, and there you are at the bottom wonderful if your kid will make it, will fall on someone on the way down, hurt someone or be that unfortunate "someone".

but now that most of the kids had cleared out, cody was the only one on top of the mountain. so i walked over to the "gentler" slide, calling and motioning to him to come over towards me. just about that time, a sweet little girl came climbing up the bridge, she was no more than 18 months old. and then her "too old to be in the play area" older brother (i'm guessing around 6 yrs old), came up with her. as i called and motioned to cody, the little girl just stared wide eyed at me, and had started to move towards me. i noticed from the corner of my eye, her brother had started to grab her hand, holding her back. so i looked to her brother to see if he was okay watching his sister. and to my surprise, he shot me the nastiest look. it was a glare. so in changed my body language to demonstrate that i was going to mind my own business and that i was clearly only talking to cody. when his sister continued to look at me (probably out of curiosity), he walked between myself and his sister, and raised his hand to "block" me from getting too near to her. and all this time, he never let up his glare. i was quite shocked. i tried one more time to reassure him that i wasn't interested in him or his sister, by looking specifically at cody and calling to him, "come on, come to mama, mama can help you down the slide..." at that, the brother said very loudly, "come on, I WILL help you down." and the moment they got down, he looked right at me and said "let's go SOMEWHERE ELSE to play". the look is one that will be hard to forget... it was hardened, mean and most of all unnecessary.

i just recalled myself thinking, "that's why we don't live in scottsdale"... later on, i shared it with chiyang and he said "that's parenting"... i can't help but agree. and also feel extremely sorry for those children, if it really was parenting. i mean, he was not more than 6 and little did he know, but what he said and the look he gave me was so degrading, so insulting and so racist.

maybe i'm more sensitive, because i'm not from here, because i didn't grow up in an environment where i was raised to "let it slide"... hmm... it's been three days since it happened, but it's still bothering me. actually, it really makes me want to go back home to singapore. where i know my child won't get looks like that. but i know, everywhere we go, there are various tones of prejudices...

yup... it's a reminder, this world is so flawed, and that i'm glad i don't belong.