Please Remember Your Baby

It's going to happen soon. Some mom's going to leave her kids in their car while she shops for groceries. Some dad's going to forget that an infant is still strapped in to a carseat and go to work for the day. There are a handful of children out there right now, in daycare, in their living rooms, that won't make it to Labor Day.

Boating deaths, drownings, prom night collisions, and this: children locked in hot cars. The predictable accidents of summer. Here we go.

When my youngest child was an infant I was terrified I was going to leave her in a car. It suited me just fine that she was such a good car baby--easily lulled into sleep by the motion every single time--and it broke my heart to know that that made her even more forgettable. God forbid there was ever a change in my normal routine. I'm not even good at the normal routine.

Becoming a parent changes a lot of things, but it doesn't change some of our fundamental flaws. I'm not better at solving logic puzzles just because I have to solve them so often now--child A needs to be at soccer practice, child B needs to do homework, child C needs to have some downtime, but preferably NOT anywhere near child A, etc. It's the fox the rabbit and the canoe all over again. It's like the LSATs but this time there's a lot more weighing on the answers, AND we're doing it all sleep-deprived. I'm not better organized, I don't have healthier eating habits, I'm not better at remembering where I put things, either.

My heart breaks for everyone involved when I hear the stories of children locked in cars. And yet, have I ever left my kids in a car? Absolutely. I've scolded my husband for doing it (the great paradox), but on occasion I've just had to dash out for one thing and didn't feel like unstrapping everyone.

We all make stupid decisions and hope we're not ever caught. I've left my son for fifteen minutes to run and fetch a child a few blocks away. I'll pay my seven year old to 'babysit' my four year old in a playground while I turn my attention to another child's baseball game in a different part of the park. These are not brilliant decisions; a house could burn to the ground in fifteen minutes, and there's no way a seven year old could prevent some terrible thing from happening. But they're the kinds of decisions we often find ourselves making in this game of parenting. The game that still feels like it did in high school when you're handed the egg that can never be left alone, ever. Ever. For any reason. Ever. And you try really really hard to honor that, but sometimes after all these years of trying, it's just not working that way. And now I have three eggs. And one wants to do every possible after school activity. And one plays baseball twenty minutes away. And one just wants to watch TV.

It's the accidental locked-in-the-car-kids that hit so close to home. What parent hasn't had a moment of forgetting about a sleeping child? What parent hasn't experienced a change in routine that throws everything off? If I so much as change from a winter coat to a spring jacket there's a good chance I'll end up going shopping without my wallet, so tenuous is my hold on remembering everything, all the time. It's embarrassing and I get annoyed with myself, but no one dies. Phew.

What can we do about this? We're a pretty connected culture. We all know the latest Britney Spears scandal. We all watch American Idol. We all know to remove the door from a refrigerator before setting it out on the sidewalk (how does everyone know this rule? no matter what neighborhood I'm in, I see doorless discarded fridges). Why can't this be marketed by someone into becoming something we all think about everytime we exit our car?

Maybe there could be public service messages in warm weather, on radio and TV. Lord knows I drive around singing the CreditReport.com song all day long, what if those people could come up with something about not leaving kids in the car? Saw their ad on my TV, got to remember my baby. Maybe Barry Manilow could write a catchy jingle like the Stuck on Band-Aids song? How about Ben and Jerry's or other warm-weather treat companies running radio commercials that could not only remind us that it's hot out and we want ice cream but that it's hot out and children shouldn't be left in cars?

I remember my grandfather had some car, back in the early 80s, that said 'the door is ajar' everytime the door was, well, ajar. It cracked us up. But if a car can speak to you to remind you that a door's been left open, why can't it remind us that the kids should be removed? Even school buses have that 'this bus has been checked for sleeping children' sign in the rear window. Remember those diamond-shaped Baby on Board signs? They were everywhere. Surely something can be created to help us out with this. We're helpable, we really are. We're tired, we're over-scheduled, but we can be reached on this. There's always going to be human error, but maybe we could get a little bit of help here.

It's easy to judge other parents for making tragic mistakes, but sometimes I think the only thing that separates me from them is just blind luck. Let's see if we can't think of a way to make everyone a little luckier this summer.

Original post for nycmomsblog. This mom's other essays are at oneofthosehorriblemoms.blogspot.com