It was my turn to take Ellery to the sitter. So I got her dressed, changed her diaper, and gave her to Christina to feed her while I put on dress clothes.
I gathered my satchel, grabbed milk from the refrigerator for the diaper bag, and buckled Ellie into her car seat before carrying her out to the car. I then fastened the seat to the fixed base, put my satchel in the back seat and began driving to the babysitter.
Only I didn't go to the babysitter. Instead of turning right at Highway 50, I turned left and began driving toward Buhler. I had been getting poor sleep lately, was thinking about my first class of the day, was stressing over making sure I had drivers for forensics meets and had requested enough vehicles for transportation. In the midst of all of this I just automatically turned toward Buhler like I had hundreds of times before.
Ellery was in the backseat, facing the back of the car. Out of sight and, temporarily, out of mind.
It was only five minutes later before I looked in my rearview mirror, saw my child there, realized my mistake, and turned back toward the babysitter. My colleagues at work gave me some good-natured ribbing over how it was almost "take your daughter to work day."
Would I have gone into the building with Ellery still in the car? No. I always put my satchel with my laptop in the back seat and I can't work without it. I would have gone to grab it, seen my sleeping child, and cursed myself in the process at having to turn around and spend an hour driving to the babysitter and back. But fortunately I learned my mistake just five minutes into my 30-minute commute.
If I had a yellow T-shirt with zigzags on it, someone would have called me a blockhead.
But this summer has made the incident less and less humorous in retrospect as 18 reported hot car deaths have occurred in 2014 alone. And according to the statistics, there is no correlation between the people who let it happen. It's happened equally to the rich. The poor. The educated. The uneducated. It's happened to loving parents and neglectful ones. Foster parents, lawyers, soldiers, rocket scientists.
Men. Women.
It's happened to people who love their children very, very much.
And those people go through the unspeakable misery of having to live with what they have done.
But that's not our reaction when we see those stories, is it? Our reaction is, "How the heck can you forget that you have a kid in the car!? How can you remember your cell phone but forget your child!?"
We become angry. We want to assign blame. We want these people to be "locked up in a hot car themselves," according to one Internet commenter. We even see district attorneys press charges as severe as 1st degree murder against these parents.
But before these people judge, they should remember that the absolute worst thing you can do is simply assume it will never happen to you. It's pretty easy to find what exactly caused this forgetfulness and in almost every case it turns out there was a perfect storm of things going on to cause the problem to happen.
The parent is usually stressed. There's been a lack of sleep. There are distractions. There are meetings, groceries, schedule changes, route changes, cell phone alerts, all the things that demand your attention instead of the child riding along with you. I have yet to meet a parent who has not experienced a level of stress like this, and who has not had to rely on their ability to "autopilot" through some tasks while they focus on others.
Before 1990, these types of deaths were incredibly rare. Many parents placed their child in the front seat because that was acceptable at the time. However, researchers determined the back seat was far safer, and that rear-facing child seats were safer still. That means you routinely place a child in a place you cannot see for the entirety of your drive.
Out of sight. And tragically, out of mind.
I can't feel anything but incredible sympathy for the parents responsible for these tragedies. And I cannot assume they were anything but phenomenal parents with their child. Yet we see time and time again parents being prosecuted for what happened and almost every time we see a jury come to the conclusion that there is not a whiff of criminal intent, that the parent was not even being willfully neglectful of their child.
But it's not enough for most people to throw their hands up and say, "Well, what can you do?" Because ultimately this is something that's preventable. There are strategies to prevent this from happening. Some groups recommend doing what I've done, which is to put their phone, purse, or bag in the back seat where the baby sits. Putting up a mirror that allows you to see your child while driving can also be beneficial. Doing something that forces you to see your baby can help tremendously. Technology even exists that can detect whether a child is still in the car, but it has not become industry standard.
But all of this seems to get lost every time this happens. We wonder what an appropriate punishment should be for something like this. Almost half the time, police and prosecutors press no charges at all. They see that clearly there is nothing that the court system can do that can compare to the unthinkable grief of being responsible for your child's death.
If you have children, I highly, highly encourage you to read the article in my first link. It's the most comprehensive piece over hot car deaths I have ever read in my life. It, more than anything, has changed and shaped my perspective on this issue.
A mistake is made that results in a terrible tragedy. And who am I to judge?
It could have happened to me.
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