The other day, I almost lost my mind. My oldest daughter (9th grade) goes to a high school that is not within our neighboring high school zone, so I pick her up from school everyday. Well, the other day she was going to stay after for tutorials for some of her classes, which she does twice a week. I usually get to the commuter lot at 5:30pm and am at her school by 5:45pm. So I called her as I normally do and there was no answer. Ok, no problem, maybe she didn’t hear the phone, maybe she was using the restroom. Well, 20 minutes and 11 calls later, still no answer. Alright, now I am getting a little bothered. My daughter always answers her phone when I call her. A part of me was super irritated and mad because I had just got off work and I wanted to go home and I started to think, alright, she is 14 and she’s probably doing something she should NOT be doing. BUT, then I thought, what if she isn’t? What if something is wrong?
Now, I am really starting to freak out internally. I get out of my car and check to see if any of the school doors are open and of course they are not. So here I am standing outside by the school doors in the dark, looking around at this ridiculously huge school and feeling totally lost, helpless and alone. All the damn doors were locked, I didn’t see any of her friends hanging around, my daughter wasn’t answering her phone and I was on the verge of a breakdown. I felt so sick. More than that, I felt extremely alone. I wasn’t going to call my mother or my father and totally freak them out because at this point I had no solid information as to what was going on. All I know is 30 minutes had passed by and it felt like 30 hours.
Thankfully my best friend called and calmed my nerves and kind of helped me get it together. He asked me to give him my mobile login information for my daughters phone so he could log in to the account and look at the last calls she received and made. He gave me five numbers and I started calling them.
15 minutes later, my daughter called me. I wanted to ring her neck and hug her at the same time. It had been 45 minutes of hell.
Here’s what happened (and of course I verified all of this).
After my daughter got out of tutorials (4:30pm) she was told by the security officer that she could not roam the halls and that she needed to be in an activity until I got there to pick her up. So she went to the dance rehearsal for the Lollypop dance group. She auditioned for the group a couple months back, but had missed some rehearsals. So she was rehearsing with this group until 6:15pm. I talked to the dance director and she verified my daughter was in rehearsal in her presence from 4:45pm to 6:15pm and that all the girls had to put their belongings in a room where she locked it up so no one would steal their stuff, which is why she missed all of my calls.
I explained to my daughter that it was her responsibility to call me after the security guard told her to go to an activity to let me know what was going on. I told her because she failed to communicate with me, I thought something terrible had happened to her and was really scared.
So, at the end of the day everything turned out fine, but while I was looking for her it just dawned on me how alone I am and it kind of made me sad. Single parenting can be a lonely job, but I noticed these feelings of loneliness are only pronounced when I am in a serious jam and really need another adult to talk to. Also, sometimes you just need to talk to another adult to get some clarity, which is sometimes hard to get when you are in the midst of your own personal whirlwind. But, thankfully I got through it and I have no bad news to report on my daughters safety.
