Leaving Home

So a few weeks ago, I was walking home from work when Karl met me at the front door. He’d been home with the kids for a while.

“Just want to give you a heads-up before you go in,” he told me. “I think the kids are leaving.”

“What’d you do to them?” I asked. He was perfectly calm and said nothing at all had happened. They were just ready to leave.

I went inside and set my bags down. There to meet me were Hannah and John, with bulging backpacks, somber faces, and big pillows in their arms.

“Mom, we have something to tell you,” Hannah said.

I sat down, feeling intuitively that this was one of those episodes that I couldn’t brush off with “Later guys. Gotta get dinner started,” or “Go put those things up. You’re not going anywhere.” Something about how very serious they looked told me I needed to hear them out, preferably without laughing--which was hard.

So I sat down and Hannah came to face me, with little John flanking her. Her speech went like this, with occasional interjections from John:

“It isn’t that the house isn’t clean,” she said.

(Well that’s good, I thought, because the state of the house is entirely the fault of you and your brother. Besides, if anyone gets to run away because of a dirty house, it’ll be Daddy and me. So hand over those backpacks and remember to feed the cats. But I held my tongue.)

“It isn’t that you and Daddy are too hard on us,” she continued. “It’s just that, you know, it’s REALLY hard to be in the same place every day. It’s boring. John and I…well…we want an adventure. So we’re going away for two days.”

“We’ll miss you guys,” says John, with utter seriousness and with a reassurance in his voice that I found a little jolting coming from a four-year-old.

Hannah went on: “I’ll hold John’s hand and we’ll stay together. We have books to read. We’ll be careful when we cross streets. We’ll sleep under trees.”

“We love you guys,” John interjects again, and I’m beginning to wonder if he’s been coached.

“Really,” says Hannah. “We’ve got it all planned out. We just want to see more of the world, you know? We just want to be on our own for a little while. So can we?”

Silence.

I took a few deep breaths before I answered. Not because I was angry, but because it took every ounce of energy I had to fight back the belly laugh struggling to get out and also because, frankly, I was trying to think of a good answer. I wanted to appear to take this very seriously, in the spirit in which it was presented to me. And, again, I had that intuitive sense that a lot was riding on my response. I had to give an answer that let them know I had listened, I understood, that their earnestness meant something to me.

So I did what any good parent would do: I dodged direct responsibility and kept it simple.

“I hear what you’re saying,” I told them. “And I understand. There’s only one problem.”

“What?” they asked in unison, with expectant little faces.

“It’s against the law.”

I went on to tell them that the police would return them home as soon as they saw them out alone, because children aren’t allowed to roam the streets without their parents. "You have to be 18 to do that."

“Sorry,” I said. “It sounded like a good plan.”

“So, can I do it when I’m 18?” Hannah asked.

“Sure.”

“OK!” she said. And it was that easy. They put up their backpacks and went on with the rest of the day.

When recounting this story later, I told a friend that Karl and I have since wondered why we didn’t just give them 20 bucks and send them on their merry way. Two days alone without the kids sounds like heaven.

“We learn slowly,” I told my friend, “but we learn.”

B.