This is the story of how I accidentally discovered the power of kindness to turn down the temperature.

Kristen and I stopped for a fancy lunch to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary on our way to pick up our kids from their weekend visit to their grandparents.

The restaurant was busy, and we had to wait 20 minutes before we got a seat. It was almost 1pm.

A family sat down behind me – a mom, a dad, and two kids, one of them pretty little – probably less than 2 years old.

The two-year-old acted like a two-year-old. She was fussy, she was squirmy… and the mom kept yelling at her. “You’re not acting like a big girl.” I wanted to get up and say “She’s NOT a big girl; she’s LITTLE.”

It seemed everything this poor kid did, her mom spoke angrily to her about. Everything. But she was just acting like a kid.

Kristen looked at me with sympathy. She thinks it’s sweet when I get mad when people are mean to kids. At one point I said, only to Kristen, “Look, if you can’t tolerate your child acting like a child in public, you shouldn’t bring them to public spaces.”

I posted that as a “PSA to the woman behind us in this restaurant” on Facebook, too.

The child screamed a few times. I don’t love it when a child screams, but her mom’s enraged response – to someone a tiny fraction of her size – made me see red. She threatened to leave the restaurant, which, honestly, I suspected the kid might’ve preferred. In my anger, I wanted to get up and say something to that woman about how she should be kinder to her child.

My food finally came. Three breakfast tacos and a generous portion of roasted potato cubes.

The child behind me kept fussing and otherwise acting her age. Her mother kept talking mean to her. I looked at Kristen and said I was going to offer some of my potatoes.

And then I did it. I hadn’t touched them yet.

I turned around and smiled and said, “Do you think she would like some of my potatoes?”

The mom declined. She said their food would be there shortly. I said okay. I said it sounded like the little girl was pretty upset. Kristen smiled and mentioned that we have two kids of our own who were that age recently, so we get it, and we’re used to screaming.

She smiled and thanked us. We smiled back, and started into our lunch.

The temperature went down a lot. I heard the mom say “I understand…” twice, and more gently than she had been.

But I had noticed something when I turned around to talk to her that I hadn’t noticed when I was being triggered by her yelling at this child.

She was not a white woman.

I couldn’t quite pick out her ethnicity, but she was definitely not white.

And I remembered my white male privilege. I remembered that when my kids are with me and they act out, nobody will think less of them for it, and people will excuse a lot more child-like behavior when the children are with a man. Nobody expects men to have their kids in hand, not like they do women. A few chaotic outbursts are almost expected.

I realized… I don’t know her story. I don’t know what she was afraid of.

At one point, even though the place was busy, my wife and I and this family were the only folks in the room… and I wonder if she was afraid we were going to be mad at her.

I wonder if she was afraid that we were talking quietly about how that minority woman “should’ve had her children under control.”

And I think when I offered my potatoes, when Kristen said we had littles, too, that one simple act showed her that we weren’t mad about her not “having her kid under control” or “ruining our nice lunch out.

And I thought to myself about what might have happened if I had gone with what I wanted to do, of confronting her and trying to make her feel as small as she was making her child feel. How differently that would’ve turned out. How close I had come to making things worse instead of better.

Instead, their food finally, blessedly came. I set my PSA on Facebook to my-eyes-only so I would remember the lesson without spreading my anger, and we all had a nice dinner.

I will probably be thinking about that for a while.