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Much of the world is in the thick of summer, and with all of the fun and good the season brings (swimming! sunshine!) it can also bring tragedy. Inevitably there are stories of babies and toddlers being left in hot cars for too long on summer days. With these stories comes many discussions and commentary on what should or shouldn’t have been done — and what the commenter would have done different. Sarah Tuttle-Singer, social media director for Times of Israel and regular Offbeat Families contributor, recently opened up about the one time she almost forgot her son:
My son was ten days old, my daughter 18 months, and not even shooting espresso straight into my veins could lift the fog that lay over my brain like a cozy, soft blanket.I was exhausted, like body slammed against the wall exhausted. I had tumbled headfirst into some sort of upside down universe where midnight was the new morning, where my son slept only in my arms and only when I bounced around mumbling a vaguely sanitized version of Snoop Dogg’s Lodi Dodi.
And my daughter was 18 months, and still breastfeeding along side her newborn brother and coping the way most 18-month-olds cope when change is thrust on them:
She wasn’t sleeping, either.
I remember we got back from Coffee Bean, I had to pee, my daughter was crying, my cell phone was ringing, Howard Stern was bleeping his way through a monologue on the radio, and I forgot my son.It was so easy not to remember the sleeping baby tucked in his rear-facing car seat. It was so easy not to remember that there wasn’t just a wriggling, writhing toddler in the car crying to be fed. It was so easy not to remember to check twice and lift my son from his car seat before locking up and walking into the house. If it weren’t for my breasts, heavy with milk, and prickling with the fire-ant crawl of the letdown reflex, I don’t know if I would have remembered the baby I had met only ten days before.
You can read the rest at Times of Israel.
Like so many others who have commented, I don’t have kids yet, but this is one of my biggest fears. I pushed through the Fatal Distraction article in a veil of tears. I am an extremely forgetful person. I have to run back into the house 3 or 4 times almost every day, to grab my phone, my keys, etc. I am always forgetting something. You would think that a child would transcend those sort of things, but that’s not really true.
My own mom forgot to pick me up from preschool once, when she was out running errands. I would have been there for hours if her friend had been waiting to say hi, and taken me home when she didn’t show up. The could-have-beens of that situation haunt her to this day. It comes down to luck or grace more often than people want to believe. The suggestions of sensors in the cars is so smart, and should just be automatic. No one wants to admit that it could happen to them.
The ‘Fatal Distraction’ article just destroyed me. Tears. It’s because I can see myself in those parents — busy, working, drop offs, errands. I am already so afraid of all the terrible things that could happen to my daughter. I have to work on balancing healthy precaution with terror.