It was May. The weather here in Charleston, South Carolina was starting to warm up. If you’re from here you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s 60 degrees in the morning and 92 degrees by noon.
I had two little ones under the age of two. My youngest was only a month old, but I was determined to get out of the house and prove to myself that I had this two kid thing in the bag. My mom group was meeting and you better believe I was going to make it.
The three of us pulled up to the park at the same time as my friend. I could tell some kind of commotion was going on because of the look on my friend’s face. As I got out of the car I was starting to put the pieces together about what was going on. Another mom had the same “take your kid to the splash pad” idea. And it seemed like she was in a complete panic.
She locked her keys in her car with her young daughter still strapped in her car seat. With my kids still strapped in themselves, I asked if she wanted me to try to break a window. I grabbed my son’s metal shovel and whacked at her window twice. The shovel along with my strength was not strong enough to break that window! My friend caved and called the fire department.
We made sure she was ok and I got my kids out of the car and headed towards the splash pad. The thoughts of that mom completely losing it kept circling around my mind. “I think that was a little bit of an overreaction”, I said to my friends as we unpacked the kids’ water toys. It was easy for me to say that because it wasn’t me with the baby locked in the car where I couldn’t reach him.
At least not yet.
Forty-five minutes went by and we were done with the splash pad. After fighting with my youngest to breastfeed in public in the heat I was ready to just head home. As parents, you realize the many steps it takes to get the kids loaded into the car. The baby, the toddler, the bag, the stroller, and the toys were all in tow.
I sat Jax (my oldest) in the passenger’s seat while I took my screaming baby out of his stroller. I turned around for literally a second and the passenger door closed behind me. All of the other doors were closed and my keys were resting so nicely on my seat.
He was locked in.
“Please push that button for Mama! Please baby! Do it for Mama!” I tried to stay calm, but I was feeling my emotions getting more and more heightened. Jax laughed as he thought this was the most fun game of Mama can’t get me he’d ever played.
“I can’t even believe this is happening 45 minutes after the woman I’d called the overreactor did the same exact thing!” My friends saw my panic as I yelled “He locked himself in!” They came over and were trying to talk Jax through pushing the same button he did to lock me out. It wasn’t happening. I called my husband hysterical.
He reminded me that after our truck got broken into a few years ago the back window never latched properly. I jumped in the bed of the truck with my baby still screaming tucked in my arms. “Give me the baby Ash!” my friend said. I slid the tiny door open and still couldn’t reach far enough in to get the keys or to Jax.
I was a complete mess.
Lessons learned
All social graces and care went out the window. It was like the overwhelm of having both kids, the postpartum, and the getting locked out all made its way to the ever fragile surface. The surface where I was trying (up until this point) to prove that I had everything all together too soon after my baby was born.
I was so wrong and this situation wrecked me. We ended up sliding one of my friend’s kids into that tiny window and he unlocked everything for me. I could tell how proud of himself he was as he asked his mom “Did I save Jax!?”
The moral of the story is to never judge the shoes that someone is wearing until you’ve walked a mile in them. You never know how you’re going to react to a situation. In fact, it could be the exact way you never thought you would. Luckily, everyone in this story was perfectly fine in the end, but it taught me a few lessons that I obviously needed.
