Meteor Shower Adventure

Eric and Jake a few years after the meteor shower incident^

Developmentally, we learn that age three is an age of no fear. It is the age when a child explores the world around him or her and pushes the envelope so to speak. It is a time they don’t emphasize enough.. You hear of the terrible twos and those teenage years but 3 manages to hide in there. My daughter managed to avoid a third birthday adventure, my sons on the other hand perhaps, because their birthdays are in the summer each had such an adventure.
Jake’s story is perhaps most dramatic because he is by nature more adventurous and impulsive. We used to live in a more populated area about three hours south of here. We never took the kids to Disney world instead spending our vacations with friends and relatives visiting beaches and lakes. Every summer we would head 6 hours north to visit friends and watch the Persied meteor showers where there was less light pollution. We had just come back from one of our August trips, (in fact that August the kids and I had spent a month in northern Maine, while my husband and friends worked on our little house to ready it for a sale. The repairs were not finished, so we were staying at my mother’s ten miles away.)

Still bitten by the stargazing bug, we were out in the yard with a telescope on that hot summer night with Renee and Eric until after their bedtime. When we finally went to sleep, we all slept quite soundly. At my mother’s the air conditioner and fans were whirring away we did not have such contrptions so at 3 in the morning , we did not hear Jake slip out the kitchen door to continue his star gazing. My mother is also in the habit of locking her door so it locked behind him when he went out.

When he tried to come back in that door, he could not. So he began screaming and we didn’t hear him. Whether it was the whirr of the air conditioner or the exhaustion of the trip not one of us heard him. But He managed to wake most of the neighborhood. They probably didn’t have air conditioners running and had their windows open. Because he was screaming LET ME IN!! YOU CAN’T LOCK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE! No one really came to his aid, someone called the police.

The front door of the house wasn’t locked and the police walked in. The officer said “Shirley ( my mother) you are in big trouble.” I flew out of bed to see three police cruisers from two towns in my mothers yard and my son having fun at the wheel of the cruiser. It was a more populated area but small suburban towns. I was totally shocked and actually embarrassed, but glad that my son did not have to spend the night on the porch and that he was quite safe. I took him in my arms and showered him with kisses and asked him what he was doing outside he told me he wanted to look at the stars with us.

I explained to the officers that I hadn‘t heard him that we had been out side earlier looking at the stars and he wanted to join us out there. Which one of the officers found hard to believe “several people heard him screaming that you locked him out of the house.” They were debating the situation. One of them said they were calling social services and the other said this could happen to anyone and there was no reason to call social services.

Social services did get called… although having worked as an advocate at that time for a batterer’s treatment program. I could think of quite a few scarier incidents where they hadn’t been called. None the less there was an investigation. My husband headed north for a business engagement.My mother, one of our friends and I sat for the interview. The findings were a bit strange:We were found negligent and emotionally abusive, although I never found out on what grounds. But we were also found to have good enough parenting skills to not need any training.Puzzled, I asked the worker what exactly this meant. Well exactly what it says, you are negligent and emotionally abusive, but we don’t need to take your kids and you don’t need to go to classes because you apparently have good parenting skills. Which wasn’t much of an explanation.

Today a very self assured young man, Jake managed to survive his childhood adventures ( oh yes, there were a few other occasions where he impulsively strolled off at 5 and 7 which were maybe even scarier, but worked out okay). He is now an honor roll student in a commercial art program and soon he will be strolling off to college. Apparently, I must have had some kind of skills to maneuver through those scary child raising years and come out on the other side with three really wonderful and caring young adults.