Story of the Day 11/ 16/ 2015

“Mom, did I get in trouble before?"

I got this text from my daughter, late this evening.
It made me worry about what she had done that I had not yet been made aware of....She doesn't drive, so I know she had not put a dent in the car. She is not spendthrift and I can't imagine her charging $200 on a pair of boots, so what could it be? She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke...I can't think of what this could be about.

I texted her, and she sent me this, to calm my fears:

"I just want to make sure I didn't do anything criminal in the past."

Only, now I am more worried. Criminal? Is this my daughter, or has someone stolen her cell phone and thinks they are texting their mother?

I text back, "What do you mean?"

It turns out that my daughter is applying for a summer internship with the government, and she wants to make sure that she properly discloses everything wrong that she might have done. I text her back and ask what in the heck she thinks she might have done that was criminal.

It turns out there are two things of concern.

The first is that she threw a snowball at a car. The car was driving down our residential street and she was in the front yard. She was about 5 at the time. A young five, as still in preschool. The woman stopped the car and got out and yelled at her about the awful thing she had done, so my daughter is worried that she did something criminal.

I also yelled at her, and told her never to throw snowballs at cars. Since I do not yell, often, at least not at kids, this also impacted her memory of this.

The second incident involved her being stopped by the police when she was driving.

She was 15 years old and she was practicing parking in the Foxhole Elementary school parking lot on a Sunday in the summer. The school was closed, and my husband was seated beside her in the passenger seat. He drove her down to the school, to the parking lot, and she was practicing starting and stopping the car, and then he planned to drive them home, but, apparently, a police officer noticed them and thought it was a highly suspicious activity to be engaged in on a summer day at about 3 PM, and he stopped her.

It actually turned out that we should not have been letting her practice, because she did not yet have her learner's permit. We erroneously assumed that it was okay to practice in the empty lot, since it wasn't a street, and we wanted her to get used to the standard transmission in our Honda, before getting her permit...and my father had let me do the same thing, some 35 years earlier, in the empty school parking lot in Ohio, so I had assumed it was okay...but it was not.

My poor husband was totally innocent in this. His parents had never taken him anywhere to practice driving; he had learned to drive all on his own, as an adult, so it was entirely my bad advice.

At any rate, Sarah was admonished by the officer, although he did not issue her a ticket. And she never drove again until AFTER she had the permit...at which point we went back to the empty parking lot on Sundays for a few weeks before letting her out on the road. But this incident, too, seems to have scarred her.

I explained that neither incident was criminal, and that she had nothing to disclose, but she was still worried.

You see, apparently, for this position, this question will be asked of her during polygraph test.

So, I told Sarah to tell them that she was involved in two questionable activities and to provide the interviewer with all of the embarrassing details.

We should all live so dangerously, or criminally, or……..