By Lady Words Contributor
This 11-year-old boy is smart, creative, willful, sensitive, willful, determined, and willful and on this particular day he had it dialed up to 10. That morning, I had spent quite a bit of time making appointments, gathering documents, and generally trying to harness my rising anxiety and turn it into paperwork beast-mode. I don’t know why he is struggling, I fail to even articulate the ways in which he is struggling, but dammit, I will find some professionals who can help. Little did I know what kind of professionals might appear in our lives that day.
On the heels of hanging up with a psycho-educational therapist (that’s a real thing), I slid my gigantic baseball bag-hauling SUV into the one-mile-long pick-up line at the middle school. Kids 1 and 2 hop in. All was well, they seemed happy. For the moment I let my guard down, imagining the quiet afternoon of cozy reading, cooking, and playing catch in the front yard.
Sadly, as with so many afternoons, 11-year-old had a meltdown by the time we got in the front door. Tempers boiled over, yelling ensued and the scene felt irreparably dark red for the afternoon. I took my book and locked myself in the bathroom, declaring a ceasefire. And things got quiet. Too quiet.
Fifteen minutes later I realized he had left our home. I had guessed he’d scootered down the road, without permission and without a helmet. I was right. I hovered around the mouth of the driveway and then wandered back toward the house trying to decide what to do next. At that point, he sailed into the driveway and I pretended to garden. We were not on speaking terms at this point, so I was surprised when he approach me and spoke. I was even more surprised when I heard what he said.
“Mom, some guy in a parked car tried to get me to go to him.” Pause. Pause.
“Really?” I said quietly, muting my concern, feeling the heat rise up my cheeks.
“Yeah, he wanted me to come over to his car but I shook my head ‘no.’”
I took a beat. My temples were prickly hot. “You did the exactly right thing.”
He was still angry about our fight but rattled by this dude. I was still angry from our fight, angry he left the house, angry he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and totally rattled by this dude. We were quiet for a couple minutes while I tried to cool myself down from the inside out.
I texted three moms in the neighborhood: “Do I need to report this?” I expected a “Creepy, but no.” Instead I received three “Yes, call the cops NOW.”
(Little known (to me, at least) fact: if you call to report something creepy, the cops want to either come to your house or they want you to come to the police department. It’s not a quick phone chat. We had to run an errand so we went to the police.)
One hour later my sullen 13-year-old with fresh and painful braces sat to my right, and my sullen, extra salty 11-year-old sat to my left, the three of us facing two cops with body cams fired up.
Halfway through this interview it became apparent to me that we may have reported a driver for gently beckoning for my son go ahead and cross in front of him before he turned in to a driveway.
To control your face and body language when you feel surprised, upset, or embarrassed is a challenge. To do so as you sit between your two hyper-uncomfortable adolescent sons, in front of two beeping and blinking body-cammed police officers with ceiling light twinkling off the holsters of their guns, requires an out-of-body flight. I looked hard at the upper corner of the room, and bit a tiny bit of flesh on the inside of my lower lip. Was I about to laugh or cry?
By the end, we determined the man did seem to be beckoning, the son did the right thing coming to mom, the mom did the right thing calling the cops. They handed me a slip with the case number and the lead cop took one final grim look at son and said, “You must never scooter without your helmet. Be safe.” We all felt validated.
Lady Words 