Parenting on Saturday

My Middle School son has a group of friends that he likes to meet at a park nearby for skateboarding. A couple of years ago we made the transition to allow him to ride his bike or skateboard to this park (at first he had to go with his older brother) alone, or to a friend’s house, and be home at a designated time. This skatepark is next door to the baseball fields and hockey rink so many times he will be there while we are watching one of his brothers’ baseball games (it is very busy with parents nearby watching these games).

We are strict parents regarding cell phones. We don’t yet see the need for our sons to have one at school, but we do have extra phones we’ve added on to our family plan, and we refer to them as the red phone and the white phone, and when they leave the house on the weekend they put a phone in their pocket.

Over the weekend Hubs and I went to Youngest’s baseball game and brought along Middle Son who went to the skatepark and then we left him there afterwards with instructions to be home at 5:30. Hubs and I went back home and then we had to divide and conquer a tag-team shopping expedition for our High School son who needed a new clothes ensemble within two hours for an event that night. Hubs and Oldest left the house. I was getting ready to leave with Youngest and my phone rings and it is Middle Son.

“Hi Mom, I’m with my friends at the skatepark and there is a guy I have seen a few times here and he can take us to another skatepark and he is old enough to drive and one of my friends knows him--“.

Me: “OHHHH NOOO. NO WAY ABSOLUTELY NOT YOU ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE IN A CAR WITH ANYONE. DO YOU HEAR ME????!!? I’m Glad you called me, BUT NOOO”

Him: “OK”.

A few months ago I had a terrorizing dream in which this Middle Son of mine arrives home from the skatepark and non-challantly tells me that he accepted a ride from a male stranger. I screamed and practically fell to my knees (in my dream) over the horror and shock that he got into a car. Nothing happened to him in my dream, but in my dream we then found out that this man lived nearby and was indeed a pedophile. Of course in my dream I went ballistic demanding of him to know why on earth he would do that, after everything we have taught him (!!!).

In real life after this dream, I was driving Middle Son somewhere and told him about this dream and he was like, “Mom, I would never get in a car with stranger!!! Come on!!

In real life I had just found this website in which you can enter your zip code, and then see the names and faces of convicted pedophiles, which, when viewed, causes me to stop breathing and then my skin turns to goosebumps.

So back to this past Saturday, having made my point with Middle Son, I get off the phone. I recalled my bad dream from a few months before about accepting a ride from a stranger. I then went into the laundry room, closed the door, and called Hubs on his cell. And then I freaked the fuck out.

Me (with shaky voice that went up an octave with each word): “Middle Son just called me from the skatepark and asked if he could go with his friends and a stranger to another skatepark and I said No (and now starting to cry and shout) and you know I had a Bad Experience once!

Hubs, “I know, OK, I’ll call him and why don’t you go over there.”

The skatepark is just 4 minutes away, and on the way to a TJ Maxx and Target, for the 2-hour Mission to find clothes for High School son. I called Middle Son back and he said that no one was going anywhere, and the stranger was one of his friend’s cousins but since he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, no one was going to go anywhere. Well, alrighty then. I went on to TJ Maxx.

* * * * * *

I had a childhood abuse experience at age 6 that I never given a conscious thought until just the past few years. When I was 6 years old we moved from Calif to a tiny, town in Florida on the Gulf for several months. I had to finish the last couple months of first grade with a really mean teacher. My mother, brother and I lived with my grandmother a couple of blocks from the beach. My brother would go to the pier and fish and we made friends with another family or two with girls. There was a single man, about age 55 that people knew, I think just from being at the beach. He hung out with kids. And sometimes I was at the beach with no adults. On one of those adult-less days he told me he wanted me to meet some friends of his at another part of the beach. So I got in his car and we drove the two minutes to another street, went onto the beach, looked around for his friends, got back into his car, and returned back to the same part of the beach. Nothing happened that day. But then another time I was in the ocean with him and there were people I knew up on the beach. I was wearing a bright orange one-piece bathing suit with a white ruffle down the front. He held me and floated me around in circles around him. And then he took his fingers and rubbed all around my private parts and I knew that he shouldn’t. He asked me if that felt good and I said No. So he stopped.

I told my mom that night, and I remember she was mad. She mentioned it to a friend of hers who was the mom of my friend. This woman told my mom that of her 3 daughters, it happened to my friend too sometime previously. One day soon after, our moms and us girls were at the beach eating peanut butter on saltines and this man, this pedophile, approached as usual and said hello. The way our moms handled it was to turn their backs and not reply. We moved back to Calif a couple of months later.

* * * * *

Three years later when I was 9 I was once again on the Gulf but just on vacation. My brother and I and a bunch of kids were in the ocean. Back then you would swim till you could barely touch, and then step way up onto a sandbar and reach down and pull up sand dollars and star fish and look at horseshoe crabs. I was about to step up but I lost my footing and I was gulping water and I was panicking. I remember gasping for air and couldn’t get any and the rest of the kids were on the sandbar. Then a man lifted me up. It was that same man. “Do you remember me?” I asked him? Yes, he told me he remembered me. I never saw him again and never thought about this again until a few years ago.

* * * * *

So later that day this past Saturday I picked up my Middle Son and the first thing he said when he got in the car was that he would not have gone anywhere with anyone after hearing me say no. He said that Dad had also called him and told him I was pretty upset. We had a good age-appropriate conversation that night about how the day will come when he will drive with his friends but he is not there yet. And when that day comes there will be times that someone makes a suggestion about maybe going somewhere or going inside an open door of a building or something and even if you are not doing anything, just by association you can get into trouble and it will be on your record.

They say that growing old is not for sissies and parenting isn’t either.