Elopement

As we were driving the other day, we passed someone’s house and their toddler was playing in the driveway. I panicked for a quick second before I remembered that not all kids will wander or dart into traffic when given the opportunity. What is life like when you can trust your kids not to run when you look away for a second? Is it as relaxing as it sounds to me? It sounds like a dream.

Our kids (and statistics tells me nearly 50 percent of autistic individuals) are prone to elopement. That is a fancy way of saying they run or wander away. I don’t know why they do it, but my kids are escape artists. Add to this that the kids don’t respond to their names if they do get away and you can probably imagine that our life can be one big ball of anxiety.

I’d call Rory an opportunistic runner – like, if a door/gate is left unlocked, if you let go of his hand for a second, or if he can haul his hand out of your grasp and run, he will. He doesn’t necessarily seek it out. Like, I don’t often worry about him getting out of our house necessarily, but he does run away in public frequently if he sees something he wants or if he wants to go a different route.

Penny is a planner and she’s very, very stealthy. She plays the long game. You could have told her 3 days ago she couldn’t climb over the backyard fence, and then take your eyes off of her for the first time in 3 days, and she’d be out the door and have a leg over the fence before you turned around again (I know this. It’s happened). It’s very hard to think quicker than her too. She’s always planning her next move. It will likely serve her well when she’s older – we just need to survive it first.

We try to be as proactive as we can about it because we’ve had quite a few scares. I don’t care how diligent you are, it’s impossible to keep eyes on your kids all day. At some point you have to cook, eat, sit down, take a phone call, use the bathroom, relax for 2 seconds…etc.

To help alleviate the problem, we’ve done a few things.

1. We have special locks for our doors that the kids (and most adults) haven’t figured out. We also put them up high enough that the kids can’t reach them because they would definitely figure them out eventually.
2. We took a few months to teach Penny to respond to the word “stop”. When she wanders further than I’d like I can yell “stop” and she (usually) freezes in spot. Rory doesn’t seem ready for that yet, but I’d say we’ll attempt to teach him the same soon.
3. We took the handles off the windows in our home (but have them hidden close by because I am nervous about fire safety). They’ve both almost gotten out of open windows.
4. Further to the windows, we have special handmade locking shutters on Penny’s bedroom window because if given enough time, she’d figure out how to open it without a handle. You’d probably have to know her or see her in action to understand that fully…she’d make an excellent ninja.
5. We have door alarms – we haven’t installed them yet, but I like having them just in case.
6. When we come out of our house to go for a walk, I always turn right. Our street is quiet but it’s off a very busy road, so my thought is that the kids, being creatures of habit, will also turn right toward the less busy road instead of left towards the busy road. It’s worth a shot.
7. I put them in swimming lessons specifically because I’m afraid they’re going to fall into water and I’d like a fighting chance that they won’t drown. True story.
8. We always try to keep our eyes on them – if I don’t see them or hear them, one of us will check on them. I don’t care if I look and sound crazy like, 85% of the time. I’m a ‘helicopter mom’ and I’m very aware of it. I also feel like this meme is the most accurate one to describe our life.

We’ve had a billion close calls which I could talk about for days and days, but I’ll tell you about the two scariest times the kids got away from us. This took me several days to type up because it sucks reliving it – just FYI.

When we momentarily lost Rory:

Last year, Shamus, the kids, and I got back from a drive. We all walked in the house together as usual, and I went directly to the kitchen to start supper without even taking my jacket off. I sang out (like I always do) for the kids to take off their coats and boots, and then Penny and I sat in the living room together to watch a video on my phone while Shamus watched the stove. It was about 5 minutes later and I couldn’t hear Rory, so I asked Shamus to go check on him – Rory always wanders from room to room in the house. I heard Shamus singing out, “Rorrryyyy…Rorrryyyy…Rory?”

And then a panicked “RORY!!!!” because that was the exact moment he had noticed that the front door wasn’t latched. Shamus ran outside and found Rory 2 houses down, wandering toward the busy road. We had our eyes off of him for less than 5 minutes, tops. Maybe less. Before that moment he had never even attempted to get away.

When we momentarily lost Penny:

When Penny wandered away, we were visiting St. Shotts. Most people reading this will know that’s the very small town Shamus is from and where his parents still live. They have a big green yard, the houses are spread far apart, with a lot of meadows, tall grass, beautiful cliffs, and a lovely view of the ocean with the beach just down over the hill.

On this particular day, Rory was a baby and he was napping in the house so Shamus and I went outside to play a game of washers with his family. Penny was sat in the yard in front of the house. I could see her next to her blankets (which she never went anywhere without) so Shamus and I played washers for about 10-15 minutes while I periodically leaned out to check on her. I could see her blankets – and she never went anywhere without her blankets (I cannot stress that enough) so I never thought any more of it. That is until someone asked where Penny was. I said, “in front of the house by her blankets” and they said “no, she isn’t. Her blankets are there but she’s not”.

Initially I assumed she went back into the house to play on her tabby. I checked the house and nothing. Shamus’ sister checked the tall grass in front of the house. All I really remember about that part is her lifting up Penny’s brand new shoe and saying, “is this hers?” and me wailing “PENNY!!” in a voice that didn’t sound like mine and running down the driveway toward the beach while everyone else seemed to scatter in different directions. I made it just past the church across the road when someone shouted out that they’d found her.

She was dancing her way barefoot across the meadow near the road which leads to cliffs and then ocean.  When we tell this story, Shamus says we found her on the road and I say we found her basically on the side of the cliff. Same difference, really. I argue that if it wasn’t paved, you’d have to call it a cliff. We actually have never found her second shoe and we have no idea where she went or how long she was gone. Sneaky little bugger, that one.

This is not a topic I care to talk about very often because there’s a lot of mom/parent guilt, but it felt like something others might relate to. So, here’s my cheery contribution to the day!

If you ever see someone hovering over their children, try not to judge – and I’ll try my best not to panic when I see a kid playing in a driveway.