This afternoon I was driving home from the county fair when there was a ruckus in the far back of the van. I have a low tolerance for ruckuses in the car. I told Joe that he needed to keep his hands in his own space or else walk home. He didn't. I pulled over and told him to hop out.
You should know that we were a quarter-mile from home, driving down the street where the boys walk to and from school. You might also want to know that we live in a walking neighborhood, on the southern edge of a decent-sized college campus. Lots of foot traffic, little vehicular traffic. It's Joe's stomping grounds. There are kids running around all over the place in the summer. I didn't think twice about it.
I got home, drank a glass of water, brushed Pete's teeth in preparation for getting to the dentist. We unloaded the stuff from the back of the van. I said, "Where's Joe?" Elwood said, "Maybe he sat down on the sidewalk in a fit of pique." (He was mad about having to walk home.) I took Joe's toothbrush and a water bottle along with me, and hopped back in the van. Joe was standing on the street corner with four adults: a neighborhood couple and two security guys from the nearby hospital.
They told me they'd called the cops, and that I couldn't go until the police arrived.
I thought briefly about saying, "Oh, get a grip," and loading Joe into the van. They were pretty serious about the whole thing, though, and I thought it would be better to talk to the cop than to have them write down my license plate number and report me to CPS.
The cop, who arrived right after I did, was very reasonable about the whole thing. Not so the woman. "He's only six years old!" she kept repeating, which brings out the snarky in me now. ("Six? Really? Are you sure? I'm only his mother; these details confuse me.") I pointed out where he lives and where he goes to school, and explained that he had walked this route hundreds of times. The woman was upset because he ran across the street and she didn't think he had looked both ways.
At first the cop told me not to overestimate the safety of the neighborhood, saying that there'd been some recent issues with property damage and petty theft. I said, "Property crime is in a completely different league from kidnapping." He said, "Yeah, that's a good point." I said, "If the school district thinks this is a reasonable walk for a 6-year-old child [and they do -- there's no bus service for kids in our neighborhood], I'm inclined to agree." He said, "Yeah, that's true." He said he'd have to file a report, but there should be no further action. (I had a friend in the next town over who had the same thing happen last year with her 6yo, and had to be interviewed by CPS as a result.)
This woman, though -- it was so clear that she thought I was negligent. She made a point of talking about the time that elapsed between when I dropped Joe off and when I came back for him. "He's only six years old! Six!"
Here's the creepy part: Joe told me later that she had stopped him when she saw him running across the street alone and asked if he needed help. He said, "No, I know how to go home. I want to go home." He said it repeatedly, trying to pull away from her. She finally yelled at him, "No, you have to stay here until the police come." Which, whoa. In my little world, if you are trying to be neighborly to a kid who needs assistance, you don't yell at him. Maybe you say, "Let's walk to your house together." Maybe you still report it to the police if you think the parents were negligent, but you treat the kid kindly.
I assume that if she is thinking about the incident, she is thinking about how inappropriate my choices were. I can't stop thinking about the incident, only I am thinking the same thing about her. It's a strange world.
Recent Comments