

Sneaking away from the house before Mom found out.

One of the earliest memories I have is of my sister, Barbara, and I sneaking away from the house to visit our cousin Annie Ruth. Annie lived just down at the end of the dirt road from us and during the summer we tried to make it all the way to her yard on our tricycle almost every day. I’d sit on the seat and my sister would have one foot on the back stand while she pushed with the other foot to get us down the road as fast as she could, all the time hurrying and whispering, hoping we wouldn’t get caught. Most of the time we didn’t even make it half-way there, but a few times we got all the way into the yard and even had time to play for a while. Never in our wildest dreams did we think that anything bad could happen to us. After a while we’d look up the road and see our mother standing in the yard waving a dish towel and yelling inaudibly, and we knew we’d better head right back.

I couldn’t have been more than three years old back then. Mom would give us free reign to come and go as we pleased, as long as we stayed in the yard. Most times she was like a hawk watching her young, but sometimes we were able to sneak through the cracks, we were constantly testing our boundaries. In our neighborhood, you didn’t just have one set of parents, you had four or five. We knew we were being watched even when it didn’t seem like we were. And once we were old enough to leave the yard and visit friends on our own, a report of what we’d been doing and how we’d behaved reached our house before we ever made it back.



Sorry kid, no more playing alone outside.

We were very fortunate to grow up in Fauquier County, Virginia, specifically in the town of Remington. We grew up nurtured, well-feed, well cared for in a loving family, all within a tight-knit community. That’s why it saddens me each time I read about mothers who have been arrested for allowing their children to go to the play ground alone. I wonder what happened to the idea of knowing everyone in your neighborhood? What happened to the idea that “it takes a village to raise a child”? I realize that it is probably like comparing apples and oranges to view my childhood experience in comparison to the reality of what it’s like for a child growing up today. But couldn’t we, as adults, walk the child back home and speak with the parents before calling the police to swoop in and whisk the child away? If we take children away from their parents for allowing them to play unsupervised, what does that make us as a society? Aren’t the children being abducted anyway, but not by strangers, by us. We are quickly becoming the very thing we are supposed to be fighting against. Social services, the police, the judicial system, our neighbors, we, all of us have become the strangers who are stealing children from their parents. We claim it’s being done for their own protection, but who are we kidding? I don’t think we’re even kidding ourselves. Let’s find another solution.