Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  I called her one evening while hauling the garbage down to the end of our alley. Pete was giving the kids their evening baths. I had about twenty minutes to talk, and was relieved when she answered on the second ring and called me by my first name.

  “Kim?” she said, as though we were picking up a thread we’d left dangling in some earlier conversation. “What’s going on now, Kim? How are you? Sounds like you’ve had a rough few months.”

  I balanced the phone against my shoulder and swung the trash bag into the bin. “It’s true,” I said, walking back down the alley. We lived in an end unit on the street-facing side of a double row of town houses. Each unit in each row had a small garage that opened onto the alley. On summer evenings, the dozen or so kids of the complex would play in the alley while their parents stood in the open garages, talking, and drinking beer, and watching. A few of the parents were out now, including the blondest of the two blond moms who were always smiling.

  A different, more glass-is-half-full kind of person, would have looked at this arrangement—kids playing in alley, parents socializing and looking on—as a picturesque vision of American middle-class life. Family! Neighbors! How wonderful and warming it would have seemed to this other, more positive person. But for me, in the three years we’d been living there, I’d come to dread these moments of communal parenting, these forced encounters where I could stand beside these totally nice and perfectly normal and pretty much pleasant humans with whom I shared living space, while their kids did their thing and my kids did some other thing and we all looked on, watching and waiting to make sure no one hit anyone else or hogged the toys or said anything unkind. A different sort of person would have enjoyed standing and chatting about who was going to which camp this summer and who to which school in the fall; about who had learned to ride a bike and who was taking swim lessons and who had given up a nap and a hundred other small matters about which I could not have cared less.

  I say that I had come to dread these evenings and not we had come to dread these evenings because my kids seemed to rather like these evenings and because Pete categorically refused to participate in these evenings. Hell no, was how he put it when I asked if he’d come down and stand there. Why would I stand down there with those people? I have nothing to say to them.

  “Maybe because your kids want to play outside like the other normal children and someone has to watch them and I’m tired of doing it by myself, and also, they’re our neighbors. They don’t have to be our best friends, but they’re our neighbors.”

  “Neighbors are overrated,” he said. “Anyway, aren’t there like ten adults down there? Why does there have to be a one-to-one ratio? Something’s going to happen that requires the intervention of ten adults? Are we expecting an armed insurgency? A tsunami off Lake Michigan?”

  I don’t remember how I responded to Pete’s objection on any of the many occasions we had this conversation, but I doubt it was with kindness. It was a familiar dynamic between the two of us, a dynamic that had probably always been present in our relationship but that parenthood had exacerbated and intensified a hundredfold: my caring about a thing, an issue, an obligation or need of our shared family life—my caring what other people thought about us as a family—and his caring less, then my caring about his lack of caring and then his frustration at my agitation about this discrepancy in our caring because really, why did we have to care so much about every small detail?

  As I walked back toward my garage that evening while talking to Lenore, past the kids on their pogo sticks and trikes, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe Pete had been right. How much could be gained by giving up our evenings to stand beside these people with whom we shared nothing other than property taxes and shoddy plumbing? The blond women spoke to each other softly and sipped their plastic cups of white wine. I imagined one saying, “She always has seemed a little off,” to an officer, a social worker, a social service caseworker, any state-sanctioned policer of bad parents. I hurried from the alley, fled their gaze, went around to the front porch, and sat on the stoop, where the only people who would see me were the ones passing by on their way home from the train, or the nice childless gay couple who lived across from us, the only neighbors whose company I truly enjoyed. “Lenore,” I said into the phone. “Thank you so much for talking to me. I’m a little shaken up. I know I summarized the problem in my message, but should I tell you the longer version of what happened?”

  “Ha,” she said. “Don’t bother. I bet I can tell you what happened.” Apparently, she knew this sort of story by heart. “Just let me close the office door first, because my husband’s heard this spiel a million times. I’ve talked to so many people in your shoes. He’s supportive, of course, but you know, how many times can he listen to the same conversation? Okay, so, here’s my guess. You were running errands with your kid when you decided to leave him in the car for a couple minutes while you ran into a store. The conditions were perfectly safe—mild weather, good neighborhood—but when you came out, you found yourself blocked in by a cop car, being yelled at by an angry onlooker, pitchforks out, strangers accusing you of child neglect or endangering your child. Is that about right?”

  “Close enough. How did you know?”

  “I know because I’ve heard it all before.”

  I could hardly believe what she was saying. I sat there on the stoop, and we talked about the many cases she had heard since she’d become known as a parenting-rights advocate; and what stuck with me most about this first conversation was not her sympathy for my particular case, but her certainty about the factors that had caused it to occur.

  “Listen,” she said at one point. “Let’s put aside for the moment that by far, the most dangerous thing you did to your child that day was put him in a car and drive someplace with him. In 2015, on average, 487 kids were injured in traffic accidents every day—and about 3 died. Not every year, mind you. Every day! Now that’s a real risk. So if you truly wanted to protect your kid, you’d never drive anywhere with him. Or you’d drive as little as possible—the less the better. But let’s put that aside for the moment. So you take him, and you drive, and you get to the store where you need to run in for a minute, and you’re faced with a decision. Now, people will say you committed a crime because you put your kid ‘at risk.’ But the truth is, there’s some risk to either decision you make.” She stopped at this point to emphasize, as she does in much of her analysis, how shockingly rare the abduction or injury of children in nonmoving vehicles really is. For example, she points out that statistically speaking, it would likely take 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. “So there is some risk to leaving your kid in a car,” she argues. “It might not be statistically meaningful, but it’s not nonexistent. The problem is, there’s some risk to every choice you make. There is always some risk. So, say you take the kid inside with you. There’s some risk you’ll both be hit by a bad driver in the parking lot. How many times have you almost been mowed down by someone futzing on their phone as they leave Trader Joe’s? There’s some risk someone in the store will go on a shooting spree and shoot your kid. There’s some risk he’ll slip on the ice on the sidewalk outside the store and fracture his skull. There’s some risk no matter what you do. This is just part of being alive, whether you’re six or sixty. So here’s the question I’m interested in: If every choice has a risk, why is one choice grounds to punish and shame you, and one is okay? Could it be because the one choice inconveniences you, makes your life as a mother a little harder, makes parenting a little harder, gives you as a busy, working mother a little less time or energy than you would have otherwise had, makes you wonder if you really are trying to do too much?”

  “You think this is directed at women?”

  She hesitated.

  “What I can say is that most of the people who contact me about experiences like yours are women. Occasionally there is a man, but usually, it’s women. Now, maybe that’s coincidental. I can�
�t prove it’s not. But I do often ask myself: If men were the ones doing the majority of schlepping the kids around on errands, if men were the ones who were more often dragging the kids all over town to get groceries or dry cleaning or whatever, would I get fewer of these calls? I can’t prove it, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Skenazy told me about other cases she knew of or had dealt with directly over the years, other parents who’d had to go to court, who’d been investigated by Child Protective Services, who’d been placed on a registry of child neglecters, all for allowing their kids to do things they’d done hundreds of times themselves as children.

  She told me all this, and I found myself wanting to slow her down, to argue the other side. There’s always another side, I think, and so I said to her something I was sure she’d heard before. “Of course,” I said, “things are different now than they were when we grew up.”

  “They sure are,” she said. “The world we live in today, for people like you and me, anyway, is a much safer place. Crime is down. Murders are down. But that’s not the biggest difference. The biggest difference, the thing people are really referring to when they say, ‘Well, times have changed,’ is that there’s been this huge cultural shift in how we view children, in how we view parenting, in how we view the ability of children to move through the world.”

  “You’re talking about safety? About risk prevention?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “Safety and risk prevention are rational processes. I’m all for safety. I’m pro–seat belt, pro–bike helmet, pro–annual checkup. What reasonable person could be otherwise? No, I’m talking about something else—the fact that we now live in a society where most people believe a child cannot be out of an adult’s sight for one second, where people think children need constant, total adult supervision, where we believe that predators are lurking on every corner, waiting to steal or sodomize or kill our children.”

  I remembered how about a month before my trip to Virginia, Felix and I were having lunch with Tracy and her son. While we waited for our table, the boys sat down and began playing Battleship. Our name was called. Our table was ready, but the boys asked if they could finish their game while my friend and I went to the table and ordered. She and I looked at each other. Why not? I thought. But before I could say so, the hostess interrupted. “I don’t feel comfortable with that,” she said. “Someone needs to be watching them.”

  “I was just about to say the same thing,” my friend said.

  “Me too,” I added.

  It had felt obvious. Of course they needed eyes on them at every moment. Of course they couldn’t sit ten feet away from us playing Battleship. What if they choked on something? What if they both lost their minds and ran outside into traffic? What if a pedophile came into the restaurant and grabbed them both and dragged them kicking and screaming into a white van parked outside, all while we were browsing our menus, trying to decide between the eggs Benedict or the spinach-and-goat-cheese omelet? It could happen. It had probably happened at some point, somewhere. Hadn’t I seen something like it in a movie?

  “Come on, boys,” I had said. “You can finish the game later.” This was the reality of parenthood. This was a way of being we’d all accepted.

  “Are you there, Kim?” Lenore asked.

  “Sorry, I’m here.”

  “I have to run in a minute,” she said. “But I want you to listen carefully to what I’m about to say and to think about it too, and then we’ll talk again soon.”

  “I’m listening,” I told her.

  “This shift that’s taken place, this idea that it is not safe for children to be out of our sight at any moment, this idea that a good parent is a parent who watches and manages and meddles and observes ceaselessly. This is not insignificant. This has profound consequences in the lives of parents and children. And most importantly, Kim, this is a shift that is not rooted in fact. It’s not rooted in any true change or any real danger. This shift is imaginary. It’s make-believe. It’s rooted in irrational fear.”

  I told her that I didn’t understand, that people don’t just change the way they live their lives for no reason. There has to be something behind it. Some reason or cause.

  “Maybe,” she said. “If you figure out what it is, you’ll have to let me know. In the meantime, do you have a lawyer?”

  After we said goodbye, I went back inside, went into the kitchen. I could hear Pete and the kids upstairs. There were dishes to be done, crumbs to be wiped, but I found myself walking not to the sink but to the window that looked down onto the alley. The children were still playing. They pedaled their bikes in narrow circles, wove their scooters in lopsided figure eights. Some shot foam bows and arrows up into the air, then retrieved them, then shot them up again. The children played while on both sides of the alley the parents stood and made small talk and sipped their beers and watched. They were socializing. But they were also watching. Observing. Just in case. Pete came up beside me, and I nearly jumped. “Didn’t you hear me calling?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking,” I said. “I was thinking.”

  “Can you do that later?” he asked. “After the children are in bed?”

  * * *

  “Are you going to go to jail?” Felix asked me one morning, a few weeks after my phone call with Skenazy. As every parent knows, children hear everything we say, but particularly the things we really don’t want them to hear. Pete and I had been careful to discuss my legal issue only when we were certain our son was sleeping, or at least out of earshot, but clearly we hadn’t been careful enough. He was almost five, approaching what I imagine must be a terrifying age for children—the age when they begin to appreciate how far the world extends beyond the people who love and care for them, and worse still, that those who love and care for them do not have dominion over this world. The moment I realized this occurred was when I was about Felix’s age, five or six. On the way to see a movie one snowy day in December, my mother lost control of our station wagon and skidded across a highway into a gully with me and my sister in the back seat. No one was injured, but I remember it clearly, because it was the first time it occurred to me that things could happen, bad things, that my mother could not prevent or control. The car was spinning and she couldn’t right it. We were screaming and she couldn’t comfort us. It was the moment she stopped being God and started being Mom. Now I was watching Felix make the same discovery, only at a much slower, much less jarring, but somehow equally terrifying pace.

  When he asked the question, he was eating breakfast as I was running around our town house, gathering items into his backpack, gathering Violet’s curls into a ponytail, gathering dishes into the sink to be dealt with later, and searching for the cup of coffee I’d put in the microwave to reheat a few minutes before. Beneath the table, Violet was now crawling around, trying to make our dog kiss her on the face. “Oh, you a good girl, Liza. I love you, Liza. Kiss my mouth. Kiss my mouth, Liza.”

  “Liza’s mouth is dirty, Violet. Don’t make her kiss you.”

  “Kissy, kissy, kissy,” my daughter called in her little-girl voice.

  Liza began to shake. For a moment, I wondered what would happen if the normally docile terrier nipped my daughter on the nose. Didn’t emergency rooms have to report dog bites to Child Protective Services?

  “Let’s put Liza in her crate for a while,” I said, scooping her up.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Felix repeated his question. “Why do they want you to go to jail?” He was eating half a bagel and a bowl of raspberries, his lips pink, cheeks smeared with butter and crumbs. I watched him eating his grown-up breakfast and, for a moment, felt the short time span of his little life blur around me. He was a full-on little boy. A person. He had preferences and opinions. A buttered bagel was superior to one with cream cheese. Daddy was the most fun at horseplay. Trains and buses and planes and cars and all things that sped were better than the world’s stationary wonders.

  “Felix,” I said, �
��I’m not going to go to jail.” As strange as this seems to me now, I hadn’t talked to him at this point about what was happening. He hadn’t mentioned seeing anyone record him that day, and because we assumed he wasn’t aware of what had taken place, Pete and I thought it best not to broach the subject. Besides, this was a weird, legally ambiguous, socially fraught mess. I put my hands on his shoulders. I needed to know what he knew. “Why do you think Mommy’s going to jail?” I asked him.

  “Because you let me wait in the car that day.”

  “Do you remember that day?” I asked him.

  His eyes were wide open and earnest as he nodded. “Some people saw you leave me in the car and recorded me on their phone. Now they want you to go to jail. It’s my fault.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not your fault. And Mommy’s not going to jail.” I summoned every ounce of certainty and calm I could muster. “Listen,” I told him. “Mommy let you wait in the car that time, and I wasn’t supposed to. It was a mistake. But it’s going to be okay. We just have to explain to some people what happened.”

  “Why did you let me wait if you weren’t supposed to?”

  “Because I didn’t know. I made a mistake. Mommies make mistakes sometimes. But I’m not going to jail. You don’t have to worry about that, okay? And remember, none of this is your fault.”

  “I know,” he said, then asked, “Whose fault is it?”

  “Nobody’s,” I said. “Sometimes bad things happen and it isn’t anyone’s fault. They just happen for no good reason and we have to deal with it.” How could I have expected him to grasp this, a concept many adults fight against all their lives, a concept I myself struggle against?