Today was Hope’s very first time left alone at the Boys and Girls Club. So naturally when I went to pick her up, I couldn’t find her.
I wasn’t supposed to have to get her. She was supposed to come to my office after lunch. She didn’t. I gave her plenty of time, then I called over there. (the Club is on the campus of my school) I kept getting disconnected, but finally the volunteer told me she’d been calling and calling Hope, and she didn’t come to the desk.
So I packed myself up and got over there to look for myself. I know Hope, she hears what she wants to hear. She won’t come immediately if she’s doing something, she might think it was funny to hide…but she wasn’t in the computer room, where I expected to find her. She wasn’t in the craft room, the library, the gym, the restroom, and three times around the vibrating shouting mass that was the kids in the main play area, didn’t spot my munchkin.
I asked at the desk. By then this mommy was having trouble speaking clearly. The teenage volunteer sent a couple of kids running to look in various places I had just looked, and called Hope on the intercom. Then she sent another kid to make the other kids stop yelling–when fifty-some very loud kids get quiet, it’s eerie. When it’s to help find your child among them and she still doesn’t answer…
You’re damn straight I was about to panic. I was digging out my pictures for the police, planning who to call first to organize a search by people who knew her–and the adult employee asked where the other teen volunteer was. “Didn’t he say something about kickball?”
That infuriating child was out on the softball field with some fifteen other “Rookies” they call her age group, getting ready to play kickball at 1330 on a June afternoon in Tucson. Only a seven-year-old could think kickball was a great idea at 102.
No, she did not get to play. She was supposed to come to me, remember? Miss Hope got an extensive lesson on responsibility.