I swear, you can’t leave your kid home alone for 20 minutes before things go to sh*t.
So tell me, Pro Parent, how you plan to deal with it…
“daddy are you home yet?’
“Awww, that’s precious! Checking in on me already…”
Not too long ago, after a late-night daddy-daughter date to see the Broadway play, Kimberly Akimbo[,ref]Parent’s tip: maybe wait until your kid is closer to 17 or 18 before letting them see this…it has a rather, um, ‘healthy’ dose of adult language. It even uses a word that I can’t bring myself to say or type (hint: it begins with ‘C’ and oddly does not rhyme with ‘aunt’).[/ref] a had to leave the aforementioned 12-year-old home alone so she could get ready for bed, while in the meantime I drove our younger daughter’s babysitter1My mother, in case you were wondering. home for the evening.
Given that my journey was about 25 minutes round trip, I was surprised to see that she had already texted me from her smart watch about 10 minutes before I had pulled back into our driveway at 12:15 a.m. I mean, it was too early for her to be worrying that I had gotten into accident, right?
But then my eyes drifted down and saw that she had sent me a few more messages showing her concern.
“Hello?”
…
“Daddy?”
…
“Answer me?”
…
“Daddy?”
…
“Daddy!!!”
…
“Are you ok?”
…
“Hello!!!”
I kinda chuckled to myself, “Man, her concern for me really escalated quickly! Better text her even before I get out of the van and go in the house, just to put her mind at ease.”
“Hi”
“I was driving!”
“In the rain”
…
“Ok” was her succint reply.
I hopped out of the van and up the steps of our front porch, only to be about knocked on my ass I attempted to open out front door and bounced off it like a rubber ball when it didn’t open as I had clearly expected it to.
“Of course–she locked it behind me when I left! Well, I’m proud that she’s safety-minded enough to do that on her own…though, uh, I can’t believe I forget to tell to do it. Welp, Daughter #2 is already fast asleep, so I can’t ring the doorbell…better send her text…”
“Can u let me in,” I pounded on my key pad with my sausage fingers, being sure to use the lingo the youths are using these days.
We have glass panes either side of our front door, so I could see her silhouette as she approached the door to let me.
As the door swung open and I stepped in, I about immediately had to take two steps back.
“Why are you answering the door wielding a kitchen knife with a 4-inch blade?!? I about impaled myself on the second-largest knife in this house!”
“I thought I heard someone in the house,” she replied.
“Oh. I see. So that’s what was up with all those texts,” I noted.
I surveyed the house, wondering if she had just been hearing things or what. I was pretty confident that there was no one in the house, based on the principle of ‘chain of custody’. The babysitter had been at house pretty much all day, and I was quite sure that no one had been slipping into our house in the middle of the day and quietly hiding out for 5-12 hours. And if my dear daughter had indeed locked the doors right after I had left, then, I assure you, child, no one was in the house making noises…
“So can you tell me again what happened?”
It was late as it was, and I was happy to get the kiddo to bed and hit the hay myself. It was quite improbable that we had an intruder lurking about, nevertheless, there we were in the thick of some Sherlock Holme’s nonsense.
“I was in the bathroom, when I heard somebody in the kitchen,” she said, still clearly with an edge in her voice.
Both bathrooms did share a wall with the kitchen, so I wasn’t too surprised she could hear something in there. For example, both our regular fridge and our mini fridge for beverages had both been running pretty loud as of late.
“And then what happened? Was it perhaps a humming or vibrating noise?” I inquired.
“No it sounded like somebody moved something on the floor or the counter for a few seconds, then stopped, then moved it some more.”
“Interesting, interesting…”
Honestly, both of her grandmothers have quite the track record of hearing suspicious noises that may or not have had actually been made. Was she starting to take after them? But…this early in life??
“Well, okay, I’ll keep thinking about what it could have been,” I reassured her, as we walked through the kitchen and back towards the adults’ bedroom.
To my credit, I actually was trying to come up with a plausible theorem to serve as an alternative the whole intruder chef narrative. For example, I did consider the possibility that a mouse could have stowed away in a pizza delivery box that we had brought home earlier that day. It wasn’t that far-fetched, actually: earlier that day, somebody had posted on FaceBook that they found murine turds in their pizza box from that same joint.
As I opened the bedroom door and walked in, I immediately noticed something out of place: our closet door was wide open. Within nanoseconds, all the pieces of the puzzle came together.
Once I stopped laughing and came up for air, I explained my air-tight theory to my firstborn offspring, and reassured her that she had been safe this whole time.
“You can put the knife away, now, dear child,” I said, as I was just now realizing she had been still carrying it out with her this whole time.
Indeed, the sounds she was hearing, while startling when you’re barely 12 and left home alone at night for the first time, were, shall we say, perfectly natural…
“Wha–?!? What are you doing in here? I thought you were brushing your teeth?”
I’ll admit that I was taken by surprise when, as I was settling in and getting ready to brush my teeth myself, our bedroom door had silently opened to reveal the image of my daughter in the doorway, somehow holding an even bigger knife now.
“I need somebody to come to my room with me. I’m not going in there by myself,” she stated matter-of-factly.
It was in that moment that I realized that her experience of the whole matter was a world away from mine. Here I had been playing Dr. Watson, so focused on solving the mystery, that I had overlooked the clues that she had been giving me.
So I paused for a moment and finally gave her what she had been needing all along–and it wasn’t some humorous-in-hindsight explanation.
I then proceeded to escort her through the kitchen, into the foyer, and down the dark hall to her room.
“You go in first,” she said, pointing the knife first at me and then at her door.
“Dammit, kid, don’t be talking with your hands while you’re holding a knife–especially in the dark! Give me that thing! You about stabbed me!”
“No. I’m holding onto this until I know nobody is in my room.”
“Fine,” I said, too tired to argue about this sh*t.
I turned on her light and did a quick once around her room, including her closet, verifying that nothing was lurking about.
“All clear,” I said. “Now can we brush our teeth and get to bed before 1?”
“I suppose,” she said. “But can I sleep with the knife on my nightstand?”
“No, you cannot be sleeping with a butcher knife on your nightstand, my dear.”
“How about my pocket knife then?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I sighed. “Feel free to whittle away at any monsters that may visit you in the night…”
The point of the story is when your kid is freaked out, sometimes you gotta stop and just give them a big hug and let them know that you’ll keep them safe. They’ve just been mildly traumatized, for f***’s sake–even if they know what was making those spooky noises, it doesn’t mean their system has calmed down just yet.
And what exactly was making those spooky noises, you may ask? The answer to that is–hopefully–not blowing the wind, my friend.
The bathroom she had been chillaxing in not only shared a wall with the kitchen, but also a wall with our closet…where we kept the litter box for our two cats.
And, well, when Dumas Chesterfield, the male and notably large of the two, drops a Number Two, he sometimes has trouble covering up his business. And he can be rather loud in his attempts to claw litter onto his turds of unusual size.
And yes, I found it ----- hilarious that in the end, it was the cat sh*tting that had scared the sh*t out of her…
Content created on: 25 May 2025 (Sunday)
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