One time, I was babysitting at home when I heard a knock. From the tiny diamond window in the front door, I could see the blurry form of two people, and they were holding papers. It made no difference who they were, official looking people at the door was not going to end well. Especially because they wouldn’t understand it was okay for me to watch the kids by myself because I was so mature for my age.
They would twist your words to steal you from your parents, and then split you up into different homes where you rolled the dice.
Child Protective Services may as well have been the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as far as our family was concerned.
Would my foster parents be the kind that fed me cat food and kept me in a cage? Would I get lucky and only have to be a Cinderella, counting down the days until the system would let me escape? There were a lot of unknowns but for sure and for certain, they would split up the twins. Just for the meanness of it.
My mother made sure we knew exactly what to share, and what not to share, should CPS ever come a-calling. I memorized my lines just as I memorized bible verses, in case the kiddie pound ever came calling under the guise of our best interest. And now here they were. Knocking on the door. It was us VS them. It was Go Time.
I ran the goal-line defensive play I called Don’t-Get-Taken. On my hands and knees, I crept under the windows view line. Affirmative, the door the enemy was knocking at was locked and deadbolted.
“Get down!” I whispered to the kids, but I’ve recently been told I whisper-yell so the effectiveness might be called into question. I motioned for my siblings to crouch and join me as I scaled along the walls, pulling curtains closed and unplugging lamps from the cord. All very inconspicuous, I’m sure.
Once I was sure the back door was also locked and we were safe, I threw a blanket over the dinner table as a distraction fort so the little ones would cooperate. I hit my head on the bottom of the table/top of our fort when the two strangers knocked again. Louder.
I made mental notes of where the things were that I would need to grab if we got taken away right then. If I ran to the back bedroom first, I could get Bunbun, and the hidden paper between the over slats of our bunk bed. The blankies were already near the door on the couch next to a power ranger stuffed animal, so they could grab those and I’d grab our toothbrushes and hair brush.
The screen door opened. I started praying out loud. Even with the deadbolt in place, I imagined ramming sticks busting through. Or maybe a Chuck Norris style kick to clear it right off the hinges. The door closed again, and the figures walked down our steps and out of view. I didn’t dare call off our precautions, however. They could return with a locksmith. Or maybe they were around the corner right now, waiting for us to come out from Fort Table.
I motioned for the kids to stay, and again crouched below window height. Slowly I pinched back an edge of a curtain. I just knew there was going to be an eyeball staring right back, attached to an arm with a kid catching net. Instead, my squinted eyes saw two men in white shirts with ties driving away. It was just a matter of time, now. They would for sure be back, and with back up.
Operation Don’t-Get-Taken phase two. This one was a solo mission. Stealth Mode. The siblings were kept occupied and unaware because roller skating on our concrete basement floor to the Space Jam soundtrack remains one of the coolest babysitting activities of all time. Clear of the Klingons, I retrieved the folded paper with telephone numbers from my bedroom hiding spot. Back then there were only seven digits, but still too many for me to remember. I kept three phone numbers written down so I would know who to call if we were kidnapped.
It was just a maybe, but my mother was worried my dad would try to take us away from her as retaliation during one of their fights. If he did, eventually I would have an opportunity to collect call one of those phone numbers for help. The thing is, probably he wouldn’t tell us we were being kidnapped. Probably he’d say were going for kiddie cones at McDonalds or to a church function.
So I had to make sure to pay attention if Dad took us alone. What route were we taking? What landmarks could I remember if this was it? My mother assumed the most likely place he would take us was to his family in Tennessee. I would watch my Tweety Bird watch, dread and nausea increasing with each minute hand tick. If we were in the car longer than 30 minutes, we were probably being kidnapped. I’d need to start looking for street signs and a pay phone. We would have to stop for a bathroom break and that’s when I would call collect the numbers written down on the worn, soft, folded paper.
On this occasion, it wasn’t my dad but CPS who was going to kidnap us. I had to act fast. Contact information in hand, I peeked again to ensure the driveway was clear before making the calls. There were papers shoved in the crack of the screen door. It wasn’t taped to the door in red letters, so we weren’t being evicted. I unlocked our fortress and opened the door just wide enough for me to snatch the papers.
It was Jesus! I had prayed for safety and now in my hand was an illustration of a white Jesus, blonde hair flowing off his bowed head as if praying back to me. My prayers had worked! Jesus turned the kid snatchers into Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I left the pamphlets on top of Fort Table, returned the folded phone numbers to their safe hiding place, and joined my siblings, dedicating the next skate to the big man upstairs.
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