Parents, do you remember the first time you allowed your child to be at home by themselves? How old were they? How long were they on their own? Did you wax anxious?
Life with Britni means I never leave her alone. Ever. I won’t even work upstairs if she’s downstairs and Robbie’s not home. Which is what makes what happened to her so heinous…
Routine
She was four. For two years, I’d already been sending her to school in Early Childhood Special Education. She didn’t go full-time, just half-days, and on this particular day, she’d been riding a morning bus only a couple weeks (she had a car driver bring her home). The previous two years she had a car driver for the morning, too, but we moved, and I was told one wasn’t available for her. I all but begged, as Britni needed closer attention, but was flatly told “Sorry, nothing is available.”
Add to this, we had a long narrow driveway that a bus couldn’t traverse.
Again, “Sorry.”
So, I’d get up before the sun, get Britni ready, and she and I would make the 45-minute round-trip to take my husband to work so I could have the car to drive her to the end of the driveway to meet the bus.
On this particular February day, our routine was usual. I loaded her on the bus where she sat in a car seat directly behind the driver. I buckled her in, kissed her, told her I’d see her in a few hours, then went back to the house to start the day.
Five Hours
For the next five hours, I washed the breakfast dishes, made the beds, vacuumed, got the ingredients out for what I was making for dinner that evening, took a shower, and watched a grainy Today Show (we didn’t have cable & only had three fuzzy channels).
As the time neared for Britni to arrive home, I got out some comfy pants to change her into and some thick socks. She wore AFOs (ankle-foot orthosis—these helped her with proper foot positioning where she was born with clubbed feet) and always loved having them taken off and replaced with soft, warm socks when she got home. Who wouldn’t?
Time passed. It was 20 minutes later than when she usually arrived home. I kept looking out the window, up the driveway, straining to listen for the car rolling across the gravel.
More time passed. By now, 45 minutes had passed. I thought,maybe they had to stop for a train, or there was road work, but I needed to know. So, I called the bus garage.
“This is Teresa, Britni [last name]’s mom. I was wondering if you’d heard anything from her car driver. She’s not home yet.”
“Just a minute, let me see,” said the lady who answered the phone. “No, we’ve not had any calls in.”
“Well, she’s really late—like, almost an hour.” I began to worry even more.
“What school does your daughter attend?” she asked.
I told her the school’s name and she put me on hold.
About 90 seconds later, she came back on the phone and said, “Ma’am, your daughter wasn’t at school today.”
It was then that everything in me went into some weird, internal sensation…like everything dropped. It was the kind of drop where your body knows something your mind isn’t ready to name.
“Yes, she was! I put her on the bus this morning at 7:45!” I said.
I don’t remember the next couple comments, I just remember her saying, “We will find her. We will call you.”
I was in some kind of suspended state. The thoughts that rolled through my head I can’t even share because I don’t want to revisit them. I literally went out to the car to see if I’d just lost my mind and left her in the back seat of the car in her car seat. My chest was pounding, I paced, I could barely breathe, and I gripped the phone so hard I could hear the plastic cracking in it.
Keep in mind, there were no cell phones. There wasn’t anything online. The only connection I had between me and the bus garage and school 30 minutes away was my home telephone.
After about thirty minutes, they called.
“We found her,” she calmly said. “She’s been with [bus driver], and she’s going to call you.”
I fell to the floor sobbing, phone still in my hand. The bus driver called, I answered, and here’s what I heard.
“Are y’all gonna kill me?” (Insert hearty laughter here.) “Britni’s fine. She’s been with me. She’d fallen asleep and was so quiet, that when I got home I realized I hadn’t taken her to school. So I brought her inside and was going to call the school, but my phone didn’t work. blah blah blah something about bus wouldn’t start blah blah blah didn’t want to disturb her sleeping blah blah blah I’ll bring her to you.”
“NO!” That’s when I stopped her. “I will come get her!” We decided on a meeting place—a store right by where she lived—and I got in the car and drove those curvy mountain roads faster than I ever had and ever would.
I pulled over, walked onto the bus, where the driver was still laughing it off, my eyes focused on my little girl. I unbuckled her, squeezed her, sniffed her.
“She’s got a little spot on her shirt where I have her some strawberry banana yogurt…”
Her voice trailed off as I walked off the bus and to the car. My hands shook so badly I could barely buckle Britni in her car seat.
Where have you been? What has been happening to you? Were you scared?
All these questions ran through my mind. But Britni couldn’t tell me. Like, literally. Britni didn’t speak in words and used very limited sign language. When I got her home, we went through our usual routine. I stared into her eyes as if I could absorb what was in her mind, like I could know by osmosis.
What.
Happened.
To.
My.
Little.
Girl?
In the following days, we had a visit from the man over the bus garage and another lady, and Britni’s teacher. The man asked me to write out what happened so they could have it for their records. He said they speculated that the bus driver had forgotten about Britni, drove home, parked the bus, then went to a city 45 minutes away where she was helping care for her mom. Five hours later, she gets back home, sees Britni on the bus, and says, “Oh crap.”
I see now why that was requested, and had I been wiser (I was only 25 years old and so naive), I would have handled the situation a lot differently. I was so relieved to have Britni back, to know she hadn’t been kidnapped or worse, that I couldn’t allow myself to think of anything else. I was in a fog—everything except relief was blunted. I went through the motions while avoiding the emotions.
Britni’s teacher (she had zero culpability in this) was horrified by it all, of course. She didn’t have to come visit us, but she did, and we appreciated it. Because of it, the school implemented a policy to call parents if a child is unexpectedly not at school. Something we both wished had already been in place.
And when we finally let her return to school, she had a car driver both morning and afternoon.
After
Soon, the reality of the situation began to set in.
My disabled daughter sat alone. On a school bus. In a driveway in a neighborhood. In February. At the age of four. For five hours.
Thirsty.
Hungry.
Scared.
Confused.
Cold.
Unable to go find help.
Unable to yell for help.
Unable to tell me what happened.
And no one who was supposed to protect her noticed she was missing.
Then it happened. Anger arrived with clarity, not chaos—and that made it worse. It wasn’t loud, but it was justified, and it set something alight in me. I asked begged for her to have a car driver. Why wasn’t there an aide on the bus? Do none of the buses have aides? Why does she have to go so far to school? Why wasn’t she accommodated at the school in the community where we lived, which was 3 miles away? Why could they not provide a car driver in the mornings because one wasn’t available, but suddenly they could? Britni hadn’t even been eating by mouth that long (she’d had a g-tube), and that woman fed her–what if she’d choked to death? What if she was allergic to strawberries?
That particular morning, as I cleaned, showered, watched TV, my daughter sat alone. Probably saying the only word she knew how to– “Omma”, calling out to me, but I never came.
The trauma Britni experienced would never be voiced by her. But by golly, her Omma could. Parents don’t know what they don’t know, and what I was learning through all this made me determined to let other parents know. Get them informed. Ask them to be aware.
Little did I know that this was only the first traumatic thing that would happen to my little girl on a school bus. I could never have imagined that something like it was going to happen.
That will have to be shared at a later time….
