A couple of weeks ago, I headed out of the house for a lunch meeting. It was 12:30 on a Friday, and both kids were at school. Being that it was a just a lunch, I didn’t think much of how it would affect the rest of my day.
The lunch ran a bit long. I didn’t leave until somewhere around 3:45, and I figured I would pick up a couple of things on the way home, including the weekend fish feeders that we needed for during our upcoming trip. Being that it was just lunch, it never even occurred to me that it was so late in the afternoon that Abby would be done school and waiting for me at home.
While driving home, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Our neighbor across the street and a few doors down had heard Abby sobbing on our front porch. She took her up the street to stay with another of our neighbors, and that is who called me. How thoroughly mortifying.
It took me until 4:20 to get home, cursing traffic the whole way. I drove straight to my neighbor’s house, where I found Abby playing cheerfully. I was very glad that we have great neighbors that would help out like this, but thoroughly shamed that this escaped me.
People are entitled to mistakes, but this is my kid. I am not a neglectful father. I don’t know how to convey my utter humiliation at this happening, and in the eyes of my neighbors I am sure that I am a terrible person for doing this to poor Abby. Perhaps I deserve to feel bad, but it was truly an honest mistake.
Oh, how am I sure, you ask? Nana was watching Riley on the following Monday, and in the afternoon, she told me all about what I had done. She had heard it from one of the other neighbors. Not the neighbor that was watching Abby, nor the one who had found her, but yet another neighbor. Humiliating.
Last night, when we had given them instructions to play only in our front yard and explicitly not to cross the street, the kids decided to cross the street and play in the culvert near the road. We didn’t realize they had done this, thinking them to be safe in the front yard. But apparently, they were playing in a ditch where they could easily fall and get really hurt, not to mention any amount of other troubles they could get into.
And of course, when we finally noticed them missing (I’m not sure for how long they were actually gone from where we thought them to be), there were the neighbors, talking to them about not playing in the dangerous culvert.
It’s only a matter of time until protective services comes to the house because our neighbors are concerned about our kids’ well-being. We’re good to our kids. Perhaps we’re a bit more loose on the leash than we should be, but we’re not abusive and we do keep our kids safe. I feel really bad that they ever got out of our sight long enough to get themselves in this much trouble, but this is going to happen. Kids are going to misbehave, and like a moth to a flame, they seem drawn to danger. It’s just a shame when they do it so publicly, and so on the heels of the last incident.
This last misbehavior is just another in a list of incidents where they’ve explicitly disobeyed us. For their own good, they’re not going outside to get themselves into trouble for a while.
