Two days ago, I was doing my weekly shop with my daughter (who has just turned two). We finished the food shop early, and she asked to go to “one more shop” before home. It was raining a fair bit, but I had her raincoat with me, so I asked if she wanted to walk or go in the car. As expected, she wanted to walk.

We were going to the other shop across a 4 lane road, so we had to walk a little way down to the nearest pedestrian crossing, making the walk somewhere between 5–10 minutes. At no point did we walk in the road itself, staying on the path where there was one and a little bit on the wide verge (at a section where there is no path).

While we were walking, my daughter was having a good time jumping in a bunch of puddles. She was also doing this thing she likes to do where she holds my hand tightly and lets herself dangle and swing around from my arm. I have full control over her when she does this, and she absolutely loves it.

We were about 1 minute from the shop when a van pulls up next to the path. A woman leans out the passenger window and asks if we’re okay. I’m taken aback and give her a quick “ok.” I didn’t really understand why anyone would be asking this but assumed maybe she thought we’d had car trouble or something and were going to the shop for help. She asked again, quite insistently if everything was fine, and I answered the same again.

We get to the shop, and my daughter is wet and happy. As we walk in, I see the van has pulled into the parking lot of the shop. It’s not that weird because they were maybe doing their own shopping there, but something felt off to me. I do a little bit of shopping and then start to head back the way we came, but I can’t shake the feeling that I was being watched from the van that was still sitting in the parking lot.

By this point, the rain has nearly stopped completely, but my daughter is still happily jumping in puddles and swinging from my arm. About halfway back to where my car is, another vehicle pulls up next to me. I didn’t realize it immediately, but the van was also right behind this car. An older woman winds down her window and asks me if there are any problems. I say no, now very confused about what’s happening.

The woman looks very unsure and concerned and keeps pressing the question. After a few “nothing’s wrong” type of answers, I ask her if she thinks there is a problem. She told me she was concerned because I was walking my daughter in the rain, “and she’s soaked.” I showed her that my daughter was happy, explained that she wanted to walk in the rain, that she was in her raincoat and barely wet at all (in fact, it had completely stopped raining at this point).

I brush off her comments and keep walking. At which point, I hear a man’s voice behind me calling, “Sir, sir, stop right there, I’ve called the police.” I turn around to see a man had come out of the van (the same van that had pulled over earlier and seemed to be watching me). I’m a small guy, and this man was quite intimidating physically, much bigger, and taller than I am. He comes up to me and starts telling me in an angry/threatening tone that he’s been watching me “dragging my daughter around” and can see “she hasn’t been changed, look at how full her diaper is.” I’m completely taken aback by this and don’t manage a properly clear response.

I tried to tell him that she was jumping and swinging from my arm and that her diaper looks big because she wears very thick cloth nappies. He ignored the comment about the cloth nappies and responded to the comment about her swinging with words to the effect of “I have kids, and that is not how you treat them. No kid likes being held like that”. I’m beating myself up for not explaining the situation more clearly, and I can’t help but feel that if I’d said things in another way, he might have listened to me and understood the situation.

I tried to continue walking, but he insisted I stay where I was. Again, this was a threatening sounding and looking guy, and to keep things as calm as I could, I didn’t feel I had any other option but to comply. At this point, my only thought was to keep things safe for my daughter and wait until the police arrived. A police car turned up about a minute later, and the guy from the van immediately began gesturing angrily at me, telling the cop what I had done.

The cop comes over to me, asks me a few basic questions about what I was doing. I told him what had happened, he asked for my ID and radioed someone to check it. He then briefly spoke to my daughter, asking her if she was okay. She’s always been shy around new people, so she turned away from him and clung to my leg, but I got her to speak to him as best she could and was satisfied that everything was fine with her.

He said that what we were doing (referring to walking in the rain) was unusual, but I was doing nothing wrong and was free to go. At which point, the guy from the van starts yelling again about her being dragged and not having her diaper changed. The cop has to usher the man away physically, but I don’t stick around to see what happened as I'm free to go.

I carry on walking, and the first thing I do is check on my daughter. She didn’t seem off and was much more interested in finding another puddle to jump in, so we headed back to the car. When I get to the car, I see that the van is now in this parking lot, facing me from 3 or 4 spaces away.

This really freaks me out, but I try to tell myself I’m just paranoid and that they have moved on with their day and happen to be shopping at this store now. I ask my daughter how she is again, and she says she was happy and wants to go home, which was not surprising as this was her nap time by then. So I take off her raincoat and her wet shoes and socks and strap her into her seat.

Before we head out, I sit in the car for a bit, watching the van. I can clearly make out the woman and the man sitting in their van, not getting out and definitely not doing any shopping. I decide I will pull out onto the road, then pull straight back into the parking lot from another entrance to prove that I’m just paranoid. Well, I was wrong. I was not just paranoid. As I start to drive, so does the van. As I pull back into the parking lot, they pull right back in too.

I take a minute to compose myself and see that the cop car is still sitting at the side of the road where they had pulled over to talk to me. I pull out of the parking lot again and drive straight up to the police car, not paying attention to what the van is doing this time. He says that the van man was angry because nothing was being done against me. I said I was really shaken up by the whole thing and explained what had happened in the parking lot. He suggested I take a long way back and call 911 if they did end up following me home.

So, I start driving in the opposite direction from home, but now I’m definitely paranoid. I don’t see the van anywhere, but the car directly behind me looks like the second one with the older woman in? I try to tell myself that it’s nothing but pull in and out of a bunch of parking lots anyway, losing the car behind me.

Eventually, I turn the car around, actually going in the direction of home now. As I drive by where the cop car was, I see he’s still there, and now the van is pulled up next to him. I’m not happy that this guy is still not letting this go, but at least he isn’t following me. I drive home in a very indirect way, stopping now and then to see if the van is behind me, but there’s no sign of him. My brain switches to autopilot at some point, and the next thing I remember, I’m back at home.

Thanks to the pandemic, my wife is working from home. She was on her lunch break at the time, so I told her the whole story, and she was able to take some time to look after our daughter because I was far too shaken up to be a properly attentive parent. I checked in again with my daughter later, and she said that talking to the policeman was scary but that she’d had fun at the shops with daddy. Honestly, I’m super impressed with how she handled it. She dealt with the situation like a real champ.

Cut to now, 2 days later, and I’ve been up all night because I can’t stop thinking about what happened. Would it have solved the situation if I had explained things more clearly to the van man? Should I have done more with the policeman over my concerns? What was happening when I passed by the cop car on my way home and saw him talking to van man?

How many other people think I’m mistreating her? Was van man just a male Karen, or was I really mistreating her? Am I still mistreating her? What other “unusual” things am I doing with her? When will someone call me out for something next? Will they call the police again, or will it play out differently next time, with someone taking matters into their own hands?

I am feeling like a complete mess. I’ve lost all sense of confidence in how I raise my daughter and don’t know how to get it back. I feel unsafe and scared of what might happen next time we’re out in public. Here’s to hoping I can put this behind me soon.