The kindness of strangers: on a stressful day, I reversed into another mum’s car – and she told me not to worry

Perhaps she could hear a child’s shrieks over the blasting Baby Shark, but in that moment she chose mercy

• This is the first in a series of stories on the kindness of strangers

Last year, on a hot afternoon just before Christmas, I was picking my daughter up from childcare. That in itself is usually a pretty stressful situation. But on this day my seasonal anxiety was compounded by a toddler’s sleep regression and a family fight that, after decades of simmering tension, was at last boiling over.

Out of respect for involved parties – and fear of setting off round two – I’ll skip the details. But for the sake of this story all you need to know is that I was trying to back out of a very busy car park while a child screamed and I wondered if the people I loved most in the world would ever speak to each other again. Somewhere in that fugue of emotional and auditory anguish I backed right into another mum’s car.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/zKHNJOE