(Allthemoms.com) Picture this: A toddler maybe 2 years old is screaming, crying and running inside the busy LAX airport. The flight is boarding; his pregnant mother tries chasing him but fails. He won’t come. She plops on the ground, head in hands, and cries.
Here’s where you might imagine passersby looking away in discomfort. Some perhaps even rolling their eyes because, you know, people suck.
But not this time.
A handful of help, a world full of change
Last Friday, LAX traveler Beth Dunnington shared this story in a Facebook post that has gone viral with 47,000 reactions and 14,000 shares.
She noticed the distressed mother as she waited to board her work flight to Portland. Perhaps instinctively, six or seven women — all strangers— got up to help, she said.
“I sang ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider‘ to the little boy… one woman had an orange that she peeled, one woman had a little toy in her bag that she let the toddler play with, another woman gave the mom a bottle of water. Someone else helped the mom get the kid’s sippy cup out of her bag and give it to him. It was so gorgeous,” Dunnington wrote.
After it was all over? Well, the mother thanked them and boarded the plane with her son, and the women went back to their adjacent gates.
No self-congratulatory pictures. No Kumbaya moment.
In fact, there was no acknowledgment of each woman’s generosity at all.
And that’s exactly what made the experience so special, Dunnington told All the Moms.
“It was a simple instinctive thing to help a mom who needed help,” she said. “We didn’t take pictures of each other. There was no fanfare at all. It was nothing heroic.”
Dunnington told All the Moms it was a “pure act of kindness” that felt very meaningful.
“It occurred to me that a circle of women, with a mission, can save the world. I will never forget that moment,” she wrote in her post.
