The Runaway

For the record, I was one of those people really looking forward to the lazy days of summer at home with my children.  I was even a little irked to read several posts criticizing us moms who actually looked forward to staying at home with our kids this summer.  After all, why shouldn’t I be looking forward to sleeping in, easy care free lunches, peaceful afternoons sitting on the deck watching my children swim in the pool, reading blogs, gardening, planning day trips to the beach etc. 

Then reality sets in.  As our special needs daughter gets older, so do the challenges.  It’s easier to take her behaviour in smaller doses during the week and as ashamed as I am to admit it, medication has helped her be more manageable on the weekends when she’s not in school.

The only problem is we’re not happy using medication.  She is who she is and we need to learn how to parent this child without it.  While she was in school we felt more okay with medication if it assisted her in being more focused to learn and the calming down of some of her quirks helped her a little bit socially.  Now that school is out, we’re nixing the medication and turning to a Naturopath to help assist us in finding some kind of balance.

Day 1 had me trying to get her to clean her room for a showing the next morning.  She object so strongly that we ended up having to help her clean which then resulted in her actually running away. 

Yes, she ran away.  E was raising such a stink about tidying up and refused to listen that I ended up getting her to leave the room.  After about ten minutes it occurred to me that the bum was probably on her laptop playing games while her dad and I slaved away.  So I went to check up on her and discovered that she was gone.  Her dad headed down the driveway and saw her down the street.  I don’t think she was that serious about running away since she obviously waited until she saw us come out of the house before taking off.  Only every time her dad got close she’d run further away.  Several blocks later, Hubs texted me saying she won’t stop and so I rounded up the other two kids and jumped in the van.  When she saw me, she got that cheeky smile on her face and started to run faster.  It wasn’t until I told her she’d be grounded for the summer if she didn’t get the van now, that she stopped and got in the van. 

I’m not sure why she wouldn’t listen to hubs but I do know he was worried about her making a big stink in public and how it would look to see this man chasing this kid down the street. 

Still, whether she thought it was a big joke or not nothing like having your kid run away to make you question your parenting approach on every level.  It was only after she was in the van that we could finally get her to understand that we weren’t throwing her stuff away just putting the excess in a box to sit in her closet.  Not once did we threaten to throw her stuff away but when she gets something in her head like that it seems like it takes everything to come to a head before anything gets resolved.

The stupid thing is we used to always keep our front door locked but lately we haven’t been bothering since they are 10, 7 and 6.  Not at all the age where they are going to run out into the street or take off on us.  Do I rethink the locked door issue and start locking us all in again? 

How about you?  Have you ever had your child run away?

Zeemaid