I Forgot My Toddler Was In The Car

Sadly, we read incidents of small children left in hot cars on too regular of a basis.  The usual response, not surprisingly, is not actually one of sadness, but one of outrage, one of placing the parent or caretaker in the realm of serial killers or perhaps of even Satan himself, one of “Well, I WOULD NEVER do that.”

But is that the correct response? 

A typical comment I see on news articles is “People don’t forget their cell phones, but they forget their child!”

Let me start by saying I leave my cell phone in the car all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  I’ll need to make a call for work and realize I have no clue where my phone is, after working for a couple of hours.  My 17 year old, he finds it hilarious that I have first, an alert on my work calendar to remind me to pick him up from school, and second, and alarm on my phone to tell me when it is his bedtime.  I can’t even describe the laughter when I don’t get the bedtime alarm because I left my phone in my car.  He finds it hilarious because he has ADHD, so completely understands being so involved in something else that your mind sort of one-tracks, and he likes to tell me I must have it too (and maybe he is right!).  What he doesn’t think is that I’m a bad parent for this, he knows how much I love him, how much I’ve fought for an appropriate education for him, how I am ALWAYS there, be it 2 am, if he has an issue and needs help.  He knows that he is a miracle baby, MY miracle baby that I thank God for everyday, born prematurely while upside down and backwards and with the cord around his neck and that my doctor didn’t think he was going to be alive…

But you know what I did one day when he was 3?  I forgot to drop him off at daycare.

A week earlier, we had switched him from a daycare a couple blocks from home to a daycare a couple blocks from my office, in rush hour time that is a 50 minute difference for a 12 mile drive when there are no accidents.  That morning, I had an argument with my husband and was stressed out over a high priority issue I was working on at my job, and I had not slept well with the stress.  The drive was worse than usual, and I was running late for work and worrying about that.  If it had been my set routine to drop off my child at daycare right before work, without a doubt I would have pulled in to that parking lot while running on autopilot.  But it wasn’t.

I got to my office and parked, turned around to grab my purse, and “OH CRAP!”  Yes, my toddler was fast asleep in his carseat.

I pulled back out and drove the few blocks to his daycare.  But it all could have been different.  It could have been tragic.  His life, my life, his dad’s life, the life of everyone that loved him or me could be a completely different story.

Not because I am a horrible mother that doesn’t deserve her child, but because I am a human being.  An imperfect human being, as we all are, even if we don’t want to admit it.

If you’ve really never made a mistake in your life, or even just not with your children, my hat is off to you, but I will be sending pillows to break that fall from your pedestal when it happens because it is painful.

That’s why they have wine.  A toast to those that understand the phrase “But for the grace of God go I,” because you’ve realized one of the big truths in life and are able to accept it.

Shame Doesn't Cause Change

I was recently banned from a community group on Facebook because I question the value of kicking people when they are down and of trying to improve our city by running to the media and putting it in a bad light whenever they find something offensive.

After banning, the admin felt they needed to state that I was and talk about my personal page, not the usual MO, so I’m going to say “Thank you” that you found my opinions valid enough to shake you out of your ordinary, maybe you will read this whole post while you are looking for “mistakes” on the rest of my page.

When my son was little, I was the authoritarian parent, what I learned from my own.  I’m not sure why, because it didn’t teach me anything.  It made me afraid, it made me temporarily comply, but it certainly didn’t make me agree with them.  In fact, it did the opposite. 

At some point, around when he was about 10, I had my wake up call.  It wasn’t working.  My life could be very miserable, and I was stressed all the time, as was he.  I didn’t rub my dog’s nose in his accidents when he had them, rather I learned to recognize the signs and took him our when he needed to go.  If there was an issue in the software I supported, I didn’t try to band aid it, I looked for the root cause so it could be truly fixed. When I got a divorce, I had a discussion about what was important to each and wrote a fair agreement (I don’t do lawyers, lol). Why couldn’t I be as sensitive to my own child?

I changed my approach.  If my child threw all his toys around the room, instead of grounding him or implying he wasn’t good enough, I talked to him.  I found out what was going on in his thoughts, and went from there, addressing the issues from that starting point.  I didn’t punish, I taught.  That doesn’t mean bad behaviors weren’t addressed, or that there were no consequences, it meant that I didn’t beat him down but instead helped him to be a better person.  The toys being thrown?  Day at school where he was in the back of the class and couldn’t hear because others were being distractive and he zoned out as a defense mechanism from the overstimulation and would get in trouble for not paying attention.  He’s a good kid, he’s a rule follower, he held it in at school but he would get home and it would all come out.  I didn’t punish him, I hugged him. We talked about finding more appropriate outlets for frustration (going outside and practice swinging the baseball bat, punching a pillow, talking it out). He had to clean his room. And I followed through on my suspicions that all was not right and got diagnoses and meetings at school and a 504 plan.  I can’t remember the last time he threw anything.  We fixed the problem permanently, not just for that day.

In the past few years, I can only even remember one time I had to discipline him, and this is because we worked through whatever it was that was causing the issues.  I attacked the root, I taught alternative behaviors, I didn’t shame.

This is how we need to treat everyone if we want to change anything.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, productive in digging up mistakes that someone already corrected just to shame them.  There is nothing productive in calling people names if you feel they have somehow wronged you or don’t agree with you.  There is nothing productive in putting people down.  There is nothing productive in trying to punish instead of trying to teach.  It is, all, in fact, counterproductive if your goal is to try to get anyone to reconsider their opinions.  I am sorry if I didn’t express that message well enough that you could understand what I was saying.  You need to start from the point where you are where right now and move forward to really make a difference.

That’s why they have wine.  Here is a toast to hoping that people can understand this, because I want where I live to be the best it can be.