And I haven't even gotten to the worst ...

Wanna hear more melodrama from last week? Yes, this is going down in the memory books as one of the most difficult weeks of my life. From layoff to losing the cat, all in seven days. What fun!

Soooo, we went to the commissary last week (the base grocery store for those of you not familiar with the military.) The baby was napping, so I seized the chance to take just one child with me. The toddler was only too happy to leave Daddy at home to go bye-bye with Mommy.

Halfway through the trip, I was about 5 large steps from the cart the toddler was sitting in, checking out the rack holding the marked down items, when I noticed this guy eyeing some frozen pizzas. A couple of things made me uneasy: he was standing between me and the toddler, and those pizzas just didn't deserve the intense concentration he was giving them. Not enough there to make me walk over and move the toddler, but enough that I kept an eye on things as I continued to browse through the damaged cereal boxes.

When he moved, it was fast. Dumping some pizzas in my cart, he grabbed the handle and started pushing my daughter away. I yelled and ran.

He didn't stop until I grabbed the cart.

"Hey!" Not an original comment, but I wasn't thinking clearly.

He reacted quickly, snapping back, "I wasn't trying to take your cart."

"Don't take off with my daughter!"

He sneered. "I wasn't taking your daughter, lady."

He walked back to his cart and started to walk off. I grabbed the pizzas he'd dumped in my cart and threw them into his.

In times of stress I don't think clearly. It wasn't until after he was out of sight that the full implication of the whole incident hit me. I started replaying it, the way he'd reacted with anger instead of embarrassment, the way he'd looked off to the side when he first grabbed the cart instead of at the toddler. Too much off to the side. Again, there was something weird in his body language right then. Surely nobody would naturally turn their head to that extreme sideways angle? He was almost looking backward. My suspicious mommy mind immediately decided he was trying to alibi himself in case he was intercepted.

I headed off to customer service. I didn't know if I was overreacting, but what if something was really wrong? What if he wasn't just a jerk, and managed to grab some other child because I didn't do anything?

Things went nuts at the customer service desk. The toddler and I got hustled into the manager's office, where the MPs were called. A store employee was assigned to watch the toddler while I went with the manager to point out the guy. The toddler started panicking, sobbing in terror at Mommy moving away from her.

It didn't take the MPs long to get there. The guy was checking out through the lane directly in front of the manager's office, so I didn't even have to walk out the door to ID him. The MPs talked to me, talked to him, decided it was an honest mistake. He had a daughter the same age, he told them. He was used to shopping with her and didn't realize his mistake until my daughter started crying.

And that was that. We all went home, me without any groceries, but a lot of questions. Had I overreacted? I didn't want to impugn someone's good name, but what else could I have done? Sure, some people react with anger when they're embarrassed. I've had people absent-mindedly grab my cart before, too, though never when I had a child in there. But my daughter didn't cry as he claimed.

Even after thinking it about all weekend, I still don't like the way things add up. And I'm still not sure what exactly happened. I don't know what else I could have done, though. It just isn't the sort of thing you can afford to take chances with these days, is it?