We had had a swell time swimming at the Princeton Club. Ulysses rode on my back as I used a double layer of blue kickboards to take the strain off my neck as I kick-propelled us back and forth through the big pool. In the hot tub, he stood on the tile bench, his chin just above the water, and absolutely unafraid as I disappeared under the surface and came up spouting at him. When it was time to go, he turned and pushed the heavy glass door shut behind him when we left the pool area and headed to the showers -- it swings shut by itself, but he doesn't know that. Or if he does, he doesn't care.

But while I was getting dressed, I perched him on the wooden bench by the row of lockers. I shouldn't have. He was tired from all the activity, his feet didn't reach the floor, the bench was smooth and afforded him no good handholds. Suddenly, he teetered forward and slipped off, slung by gravity full-face on the hard carpet.

As he lay screaming in shock and pain, two women walked by, having just entered from the gym hallway. "Someone's having a bad day!" one commented, cheerfully.

"It's a good day," I retorted. "It's just a bad moment."

They didn't respond or slow down or meet my gaze.

I was fuming, but I felt like my response was feeble. Why should I have such a strong reflex to be polite to people who are being impolite? So what if they using a tone of voice people use when they are being kind? Their words were unkind. Why should it be socially accepted to speak certain types of unkindness to a small child?

He was still crying, more softly now, when we were heading to the locker room exit. A woman in perhaps her late forties was leaving, too. She hadn't heard the earlier conversation, or seen what triggered U's unhappiness.

"How old is he?" she asked. I wish I hadn't given the straight-out answer that I did. Maybe I should have just said, "Why do you ask?" Because I knew what was coming.

"He's heading into the terrible twos!" she pronounced with great authority and, it seemed, glee. "You have a lot of this coming up!"

I was angry. Ulysses wasn't developing a personality quirk; he simply was in plain, blunt pain. And who asked for an analysis, anyway? "He fell and landed on his face a minute ago," I said. "That's why he's crying."

"Oh!" she said, with compassion. "He fell on his face? That's too bad!" But then she picked back up her first theme. "Just you wait, he's already getting started on his terrible twos!"

"Well, I don't know about that," I said, with a polite smile on my lips. "I'm going to let him be as he's going to be, who he's going to be." She looked at me blankly. "I'm not going to prejudge him according to some labels of what he's supposed to be behaving like."

She laughed. "Oh, it's not bad, it's just the way it is. I had three. I went through it with every one of them. I wouldn't take a minute of it back -- I loved it all. But it's true. All three were the same way. The terrible twos. That's what's coming. You'll see."

I smiled. Politely.

What I wish I had said -- and if only I had thought of it in time, and racheted up my nerve, I would have:

"You've raised three children? Then you know what it's like to have perfect strangers who have no idea what's happening come on up to you uninvited and diagnose your child."

And screw the smile.