oddities of parenting #8,951 (a mild rant)
This evening the immediate family headed over to the boy's school for the annual ritual of Open House. We received reassurances that he was doing great, we had fun talking to other parents and neighbours and his (very bubbly and excellent) teacher, but due to a miscue on my part we didn't sign him up for on-site babysitting so we switched off and each went to one session of the open house while the other hung out with the boy. I got him to finish his homework pretty quickly, so we headed out to tour the school.
There is a playground called the Rainbow Playground which is set apart from the main campus of the school down a walkway behind a hill. It's in the back corner, away from everything else. The boy wanted to play down there, so we started walking that way. Along the way we caught up with a woman and another kid (turns out that she was NOT his mom, but I thought so at the time) who my son recognized, and they raced each other to the Rainbow Playground. There was nobody else there, which apparently really confused the woman, because it turned out she was trying to find out where to leave the kid who was not her son so she could go to the second open house session. She was trying to call the kid back to her, but he was determined to go to the Rainbow Playground. She said something to him about there not being any other people there, and I, coming up behind her and thinking that they were just looking for someone to play with, said 'There is now,' as the two boys had just reached the gate. The woman said 'Oh, ok, I'll see you afterward' and vanished before I registered that she was talking to me. She took off and left me, a complete stranger, with what turned out to be her nephew. So here I was on this playground off in the back of beyond with a kid that my son knows but I've never seen before and nobody else in sight. The boys were already playing together, and rather than drag them off to find a woman who had dissipated into thin air, I let them play and just sat around and watched them.
When it came time for us to go, we headed out of the Rainbow Playground to meet Chow, and I brought the other boy along with thoughts of depositing him with one of several teachers I knew up on the more populated parts of the schoolyard. He didn't want to go there, and he kept running off in different directions with my son behind him, but eventually we got him to decide where he wanted to go and we started heading that way.
Not too far from his destination he got intercepted by the principal, the vice-principal and the missing aunt, who were getting ready to call out the National Guard (but who had NOT been down to the Rainbow Playground where she had left him). There were a couple of other adults in that group who I never did identify. The vice-principal was asking the kid where he'd been, and he was pointing back toward me as we were getting closer to them. I could hear them saying something about 'she's watching me,' and I said 'oh no I'm not!' very loudly. That got the VP's attention quite quickly, and she looked a question at me. I told her that the kid's relative had just abandoned him at the Rainbow Playground and vanished, and then I 'noticed' the aunt standing there very pointedly NOT looking at me. I repeated it somewhat more loudly: 'Oh, here she is! She just left him down at the Rainbow Playground!' I got a 'calm-down' pat on the arm, as in 'yes, we can see that this incompetent dimwit left you with her charge and then freaked, we'll deal, you're fine,' so we left them to it and went home.
I guess I'm glad that I look so trustworthy, and of COURSE I wasn't going to let the kid get hurt/abandoned/whatever, but jeezus freaking christ, people, whatever possesses some people to just run off and leave their charge without confirming that they're looked after? At 7, I would have been fine with them being on the other playground by themselves, and I do try really hard not to be a helicopter parent, but the Rainbow Playground is just too far away and isolated. And the high school was having a football game, so the noise level was pretty high, which means that a hurt kid crying 'help' wouldn't have even been heard down there. The kid had told me that he was there with three people, but I guess they couldn't be bothered to work out a kid-minding schedule among them. Feh.
There is a playground called the Rainbow Playground which is set apart from the main campus of the school down a walkway behind a hill. It's in the back corner, away from everything else. The boy wanted to play down there, so we started walking that way. Along the way we caught up with a woman and another kid (turns out that she was NOT his mom, but I thought so at the time) who my son recognized, and they raced each other to the Rainbow Playground. There was nobody else there, which apparently really confused the woman, because it turned out she was trying to find out where to leave the kid who was not her son so she could go to the second open house session. She was trying to call the kid back to her, but he was determined to go to the Rainbow Playground. She said something to him about there not being any other people there, and I, coming up behind her and thinking that they were just looking for someone to play with, said 'There is now,' as the two boys had just reached the gate. The woman said 'Oh, ok, I'll see you afterward' and vanished before I registered that she was talking to me. She took off and left me, a complete stranger, with what turned out to be her nephew. So here I was on this playground off in the back of beyond with a kid that my son knows but I've never seen before and nobody else in sight. The boys were already playing together, and rather than drag them off to find a woman who had dissipated into thin air, I let them play and just sat around and watched them.
When it came time for us to go, we headed out of the Rainbow Playground to meet Chow, and I brought the other boy along with thoughts of depositing him with one of several teachers I knew up on the more populated parts of the schoolyard. He didn't want to go there, and he kept running off in different directions with my son behind him, but eventually we got him to decide where he wanted to go and we started heading that way.
Not too far from his destination he got intercepted by the principal, the vice-principal and the missing aunt, who were getting ready to call out the National Guard (but who had NOT been down to the Rainbow Playground where she had left him). There were a couple of other adults in that group who I never did identify. The vice-principal was asking the kid where he'd been, and he was pointing back toward me as we were getting closer to them. I could hear them saying something about 'she's watching me,' and I said 'oh no I'm not!' very loudly. That got the VP's attention quite quickly, and she looked a question at me. I told her that the kid's relative had just abandoned him at the Rainbow Playground and vanished, and then I 'noticed' the aunt standing there very pointedly NOT looking at me. I repeated it somewhat more loudly: 'Oh, here she is! She just left him down at the Rainbow Playground!' I got a 'calm-down' pat on the arm, as in 'yes, we can see that this incompetent dimwit left you with her charge and then freaked, we'll deal, you're fine,' so we left them to it and went home.
I guess I'm glad that I look so trustworthy, and of COURSE I wasn't going to let the kid get hurt/abandoned/whatever, but jeezus freaking christ, people, whatever possesses some people to just run off and leave their charge without confirming that they're looked after? At 7, I would have been fine with them being on the other playground by themselves, and I do try really hard not to be a helicopter parent, but the Rainbow Playground is just too far away and isolated. And the high school was having a football game, so the noise level was pretty high, which means that a hurt kid crying 'help' wouldn't have even been heard down there. The kid had told me that he was there with three people, but I guess they couldn't be bothered to work out a kid-minding schedule among them. Feh.