OUTLAW

Well, it finally happened: someone called the cops on me for negligent parenting.

But let me back up. It was the kind of beautiful day that only fall can pull off, with that purpling business in the sky and a few puddles under passing sun to drive home both that you’re lucky it’s not raining and that you’ll probably come out the other side if it does.

I took my kids to the skate park, where we’ve found that there is not only a crop of younger people who go there to learn and enjoy the wildly undulating and jutting concrete landscape, but also a pretty welcoming and supportive crew of adults and near-adults, if, like my son, you move easily past the inked skulls, cigarette earrings, and sweat-glistened half-nakedness and jump straight to an enthusiastic and fragmented narration about your new pink bike. (Several times, large and intimidating-looking dudes have bent down to ask “little buddy” if he needs help getting up after a fall, which little buddy finds to be somewhat awesome, and so begins dissertating about abandoned tractors.)

This was a skate park day among skate park days, though, for several reasons. First, nobody was there, so we could sprawl and loll between sessions of hair-raising plunges and veers. Second, the kids found an abandoned shopping cart, which meant about ninety extra minutes of entertainment for them and reading killer poems for mama: everyone’s soul: winning.

Which is exactly the kind of moment when life looks up and sniffs the air like a hypoglycemic marmot, sensing the perfection, just twitching for an altercation so it can blast out its deafening rage-toot.

The kids finally started to spiral the afternoon crank siesta drain, and the snacks had dwindled alarmingly, so I goaded them to the car by allowing the use of the shopping cart to carry all of our things, including bikes, towards our egress. (Why, why, with kids, does there always have to be some kind of ninja-grade plan and execution that employs just the right mix of play and sternness, insistence and laissez-faire, purpose and nonchalance? I tire, friends, of the constant need for rocket science.)

We got there and I opened up the car like a beetle, spreading all the doors open to release afternoon heat and let the kids crawl up into their car seats and situate themselves with their softies and binks and all the things I don’t bother to encourage them to stop needing. We all need so much. Anyway I went around to the trunk and started the Tetris game of getting two bikes, a wagon, all our wet gear (puddle swimming is a favorite at skate park), food tote, helmets, rain jackets, etc installed.

Within a few seconds I heard a wheezing giggle from the roof: one child had scaled the door frame and was perching joyfully on top of the car. As I was asking it to please execute that journey in reverse, the other one showed up next to it. OK, I said, just for a minute, while I finish loading. (They sometimes do this at home, are mountain goats in general, and there were zero people or cars around.)

Then I heard a voice: “Yes, it is a gray car, and there are two children…” — I came around the car to see a woman in a red dress on her cell phone, apparently describing me and my kids to someone. It took me a few disbelieving seconds to understand she was talking to the police.

HI, I said, immediately in overdrive, I AM THE MOM AND THEY ARE OK. Then I breathed out, thinking, phew, that could have been bad. And then the woman… kept… talking!… to the police.

EXCUSE ME, I said, PLEASE STOP / ALL IS WELL HERE. She looked at me and pointed with a cocked wrist, circling the scene with a slender finger, and said, “You know children on top of a car is not OK.”

UM I KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE BUT I PROMISE THEY’RE OK AND ACTUALLY WE’RE ABOUT TO GET DOWN AND LEAVE, I said, as she requested more loudly that the police send a car. My heart rate by now was through the roof. I started to close up the car so I could get the kids down with exquisite and demonstrable carefulness, and the woman started taking pictures of us. This, reader, sent me over the edge.

LISTEN UP. YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO TAKE PICTURES OF MY CHILDREN OR ME. LEAVE NOW. I WILL WAIT, I said, and grew four inches in height and diameter as I stepped towards her, arms akimbo, vaguely imagining a picture of this moment showing up in the newspaper. (This is the only time I’ve ever been happy that people don’t read newspapers anymore.)

“Garbage,” she said, and backed up just a little.

Here’s where I started to question myself in earnest, at the very same time as getting a rush from having a small but measurable threatening effect. Was I being trashy? I don’t know. Is a black bear who mauls someone’s dog for chasing her cubs trashy? What is this world we live in, where aggression in its natural functions becomes twisted and funneled and reported to itself as either righteous or shameful? [Still, all philosophizing aside, it’s a good thing someone probably once told me no hitting.]

I called my husband, whose hackles immediately smacked the sky, and who was [in his understated way] ready to break the sound barrier to get there and rip some chunks of fur off of any mammal nearby, but whose training and temperament are exactly the kind of convergence you want in such a moment— respectful and articulate but unquestionably powerful, thoughtful but strongly decisive. (Can we all say a little prayer of thanks to airline pilots?) Stay there, he said, knowing that my presence and explanation to arriving police would be the fastest way to end the whole circus. Call them and explain now, so they know what they’re walking into, and then wait. I’ll be there soon.

I called and explained, I waited and trembled, I put an audiobook story on for the kids and gave them the last of the snacks; I kept tabs on the woman, who kept disappearing and reappearing from a nearby house. She didn’t seem volatile beyond her words and insistence, so the plan felt OK.

When the cop car arrived, I have to say, kudos to the Ithaca Police: the officer was fundamentally deescalating— calm, understated, clear-headed, all while my eyeballs spun like holiday sparkler pinwheels. I told him what had happened and he kindly said that he knew the woman and that she sometimes struggled a bit mentally (something the bear mother had not managed to notice any signs of), so he would go explain to her that we were all safe, and there would be no further action beyond taking my information for reference.

The residual adrenaline coursing through me got us all straight to the used kid-stuff store, where we took refuge in secondhand bird puppets and toy tractors, the combing-through of things that remind us of who we are, by way of what we love.

There are many things I’ve wondered at since, like how quickly I’m apparently able to go from zero to rabid porcupine, and whether that would have happened if I hadn’t possessed some extant seed of doubt in myself— a thing, by the by, that our society plants in women and mothers, especially, as if it’s the last crop before a hundred-year winter.

Had I been able to sit in the puddle of my choices unapologetically, irrespective of their perfection (since perfection isn’t a thing, folks, and because I’m doing my best, which isn’t bloody nothing), I might have felt less fear, less venom, and less apparent willingness to end up on a 90s-style talk-show.

That’s a thing I’ll be thinking about for a long time. How much of my system of evaluation, of knowing, do I contract out to others, whether they’re too willing or unwilling? And…. um… WHY?

I think the upshot for me, at least for now, is that I see how downward, grounding, calming forces and mobilizing, outward, aggressive forces have to converge, to keep us upright, especially when we’re on an edge. This is a complex phenomenon, the physical version of which my son mastered quickly during his first week without training wheels— but only through a blend of spontaneous, joy-fueled play and the confident willingness to crash.

It’s the kind of thing I’m still learning.