As a child I moved sixteen times between kindergarten and graduating high school, and my parents divorced when I was too young to remember it. I have one memory before they did. It is of me being put out on a back deck of their one and only house together as a small child.
My parents were inside arguing. As they argued, I remember putting my head through the deck railing and looking down at my next oldest brother playing in the yard below me. There were six of us in total, and I was the youngest. All I had on was a diaper, and the memory only lasted long enough to remember where I was, what I was doing, and why I was there.
Perhaps my parents thought it was best to spare me the violence of their fighting, so in their mind I was better off out on that deck than inside with them. It wasn't the first time I'd be left alone as a child though. Many times after that incident, I would be playing alone or with my younger siblings. There was never an adult watching over us.
We would roll through the neighborhood on our big wheels.
No one bothered us, and we even trespassed on other people's property regularly without any complaints. My Green Machine had a lot of miles on it before the wheels literally fell off from too much wear. During all that time riding it, I was alone without adult supervision.
By the time I was nine, I was riding a 90 Kawasaki motorcycle on my own around the town and into the woods. No one thought it was unusual when they saw me either. Children roamed as they pleased, and parents didn't seem to have any concern for their safety.
There was only one place my father took me that we were not allowed to wander alone. That place was my uncle Tommy's cabin. My uncle Tommy was a Huey helicopter door gunner in Vietnam, and he had a badly scarred arm from being shot there and an even more scarred mind because of the horrors he had witnessed and committed.
When we went to his cabin in the woods, it wasn't him that my father feared. It was a large black cat, probably a leopard, that roamed the woods. My uncle's dogs and livestock were regularly killed by the cat, and we could hear it in the woods at night as we attempted to sleep.
If it were not for hearing it's hissing and growling sounds during our overnight trips, I would have thought it was just something my father and his brother made up to keep us from wandering off into the woods and getting lost. I knew it was real though because of something my father said to me one day.
We were riding the same 90 Kawasaki through the woods between the cabin to my oldest brother, who was out at a particular place practicing hill climbing with a far more powerful dirt bike, when the motorcycle stalled out and would not start again. My father was doing everything right, but the motorbike would not kick start as it should.
He stopped and nervously looked around. The bike had been "flooded." Too much fuel had been put into the engine, and he needed to give it time to clear. My father wasn't angry or frustrated though. He was afraid and scanning the woods for something unknown. I had only seen him afraid once before, and that was from a tornado that almost hit his home while I was there.
While still seated on the motorbike, he turned around to look right at me. He said, "If anything happens, you run back to the cabin. Don't wait for me no matter what happens." I already knew about the cat and nodded in agreement.
It's strange as a child to see fear in your parent. They are not supposed to be afraid. Some things deserve to be feared however. My father couldn't defeat a tornado, and he knew he didn't stand a chance against a big leopard either. He certainly didn't fear any humans though, and I had always felt safe under his protection.
He continued to scan the woods while we waited, and I did my best not to look at anything. I pressed the side of my face into his back, wrapped my arms tightly around his waist, and closed my eyes instead. After what seemed to be an eternity, my father's next kick made the small engine roar. It was a welcomed sound, and we quickly rode off to meet the rest of our family.
Unfortunately, things have changed in today's society.
Most of us are parents. We all share a common worst nightmare; It is the loss of our child. As the parent, we are responsible for the safety of our children. If they are harmed or kidnapped, we must share some of the blame. No, we didn't commit the evil act, but we were responsible for our child's safety.
I've been thinking about this topic and researching it for weeks now, and it being so disturbing is why I've not posted anything in all that time. Kidnappings do occur however. Child sex trafficking rings do exist. The days of leaving your children unattended to roam the neighborhood are long past. Any loving parent wouldn't allow it.
The topic is way too involved to share everything in one post, so I will split it up into different sections. In each section, I will share positive tips and suggestions to balance out the negativity of the topic. Consider this the introduction to a series on child safety and what we can do as parents and relatives of children to protect them.
A good place to start being proactive as a protector of children is to check Family Watchdog on a regular basis. The site will email you when changes are made to the database that affect your local area also. Any local child predator, the ones that have a record at least, will be known to you in advance.
Please keep in mind though that the main threat to your child is often not a local predator. Child sex traffickers will collect from far away places. Still, you should keep an eye out for the local predators, and that webpage makes it easy to do.
