All parents know that traveling with your toddler can be difficult, as you never know when they are going to throw a tantrum. It often seems like they end up throwing a tantrum at the worst of times, and this young mother found that out the hard way when she tried to fly with her small child alone and pregnant.

Beth Dunnington is a mother from Hawaii who was waiting for her flight from Portland to Los Angeles when she saw the exacerbated mother struggling to deal with her toddler.

“A toddler who looked to be eighteen or so months old was having a total meltdown, running between the seats, kicking and screaming, then lying on the ground, [and] refusing to board the plane,” Beth recounted on Facebook.

Beth added that the pregnant mother quickly became overwhelmed and did not seem to know what to do.

“She couldn’t pick him up because he was so upset, he kept running away from her, then lying down on the ground, kicking and screaming again,” Beth wrote. “The mother finally sat down on the floor and put her head in her hands, with her kid next to her still having a meltdown, and started crying.”

As both the mother and her child were crying on the floor, something amazing happened that touched Beth’s heart.

“… (I’m crying just writing this) … the women in the terminal, there must have been six or seven of us, not women who knew each other, approached and surrounded her and the little boy and we knelt down and formed a circle around them,” she recounted.

The women formed an effective emergency mom tribe as they teamed up to help out the mother in need. Beth sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” to the toddler as another mother peeled an orange for him. A third took a toy out of her purse for him to play with while another gave his mother a water bottle to calm her down. One woman helped the mother get the boy’s sippy cup out of her bag and gave it to him.

“It was so gorgeous, there was no discussion and no one knew anyone else, but we were able to calm them both down, and she got her child on the plane,” Beth wrote. “Only women approached.”

After getting the mother and her son on their flight, the women separated and went back to their respective seats without saying a word.

“We were strangers, gathering to solve something. It occurred to me that a circle of women, with a mission, can save the world,” she wrote. “I will never forget that moment.”

We applaud these mothers for teaming up to help a mom in need!