Sunday 4 March 2012

The worst thing you have ever done to a child


I'm treating myself (not you) to two posts today - because I'm worth it.

Last night, I was sitting and talking with friends, when the subject of 'the worst thing you have ever done to a child' came up.

The penultimate story was a good one - another acquaintance was throwing his baby daughter up to the ceiling and catching her, as you do, when he fumbled the last catch and dropped her on the hard floor, breaking her arm. After we had all stopped laughing, I related the following story which - before you call Social Services - happened a long, long time ago.

When I was in my twenties, I somehow found myself doing light maintenance for a 50 something year-old woman and her daughter, in return for a room to live in their house. Both of these women were complete pains-in-the-arse, and I had just about had enough of them after about one month.

The daughter had just given birth to yet another female in the local hospital, and about three weeks after she returned home, both the women asked me to take the baby out for a walk in the pram - as well as taking the 2 dogs at the same time. There was no sign of a father.

These were not well-behaved dogs, and I said that I could not cope with them AND a baby at once, but they insisted I should do so, whilst they had a beauty-treatment, or some such flippancy.

So I came up with a plan to cope, tied the two dogs to one arm of the old-fashioned pram and set off.

I reached the first T-junction at the end of a busy road, then - without warning - the dogs saw something on the other side which they found attractive and ran off toward it, tipping the pram over and spilling the baby right onto the road where it fell into the path of an oncoming bus.

Luckily, the bus-driver had good reactions, and managed to avoid running the child over. I scooped up the baby and examined it for injury, but - luckily again - there was none. She didn't seem to enjoy the experience, though.

When I got back to the house, I was furious, (the baby had screamed all the way home) and the mother and daughter asked me what the matter was. I shouted, "I'm NOT doing THAT again!" and told them the story.

You should have seen the looks on their faces!

What's the worst thing you have ever done to a child - without malice aforethought?



36 comments:

  1. OMG - laughing here but OMG!
    I absolutely have no story that will even remotely top this one!

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    1. Phew - I thought you were going to say that you were brought up in Bath during the 1970s for a minute...

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    2. ha ha! I had a dog who attacked another dog who was attached by its leash to a pram. That didn't go down well.

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    3. It's a good job my dogs weren't Huskies - they might have ended up in another town.

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  2. Being their father, I think. They've never recovered!

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  3. I wis with 2 friends in a bar some while ago, and they both had their 2 sons with them. One was about 16 and over 6 feet tall, the other was a two-year old.

    The 16 year old picked up the toddler, and - shouting "Whee!" lifted him high into the air, and straight against a low wooden beam, making a horrible crack as the kid's head made connection with it. No harm done, though, but the 16 year old still cringes at the memory.

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  4. Not something done strictly to the child but... a very happy and very proud couple were showing their (thoroughly healthy) new baby around the office and I before I could stop it my mouth said 'Christ - that's the ugliest baby I've EVER seen!' and I jumped back.

    Everything went very, very quiet.

    Seriously though, the poor kid was alternatively visually blessed - it looked like it had been cobbled up by an amateur from spare parts filched from several different manufacturers over the course of a few (wartime) decades. I think everyone went quiet because my mouth spoke the truth.

    There should have been some sort of Council Siren sounded before it was brought in. And, yes - I am well aware that I am a de-luxe 3D Picasso myself!

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    1. Anything that resembles fat ladies knees cannot be described as "cute"!

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    2. Yes - some babies are just plain butt-ugly, but I would not say that to their mother's faces.

      What's wrong with fat lady's knees,Grouch?

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  5. this one could run and run thomas...
    I have never done anything bad to a child but I have had fantasized about it alot

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    1. That's bad enough - remember the 'malice aforethought' proviso. You must have accidentally sat on one, or farted into it's pram at one time or another, surely?

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    2. when I worked on a mother and baby unit when a psychiatric nurse , I once cleaned a baby's bum under a mixer tap once
      does that count?

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    3. Depends on the ratio of hot to cold.

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  6. Oh you guys!!!! Really, there are so many little things I have done that make you winch as a parent. One that I think of was after having a new baby, my 7 year old son came home from school day after day asking me to write him a recipe. I always said "sure" but absentmindedly and ignored the request as pesky. Then at school open house the teacher handed out recipe books to all the mothers and thanked all who "took the time" to send in recipes for children. Cringe.

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    1. An oversight so innocent, that you hardly need have cringed at all, Donna. I'm talking SERIOUS child abuse here, not just ignoring the little bastard when he whines.

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    2. ',,, make you WINCH as a parent...' - now you're talking!

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  7. When are you going to retract the statement that I drink a lot and get nasty when I drink and that I damaged your blog?

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    1. Now Raz. Except that I never said you damaged my blog - I just mistook your identity for another Canadian resident who inundated me with countless numbers of 'AdSense' tutorials immediately following my question to you about how much money you made from AdSense - and I am truly sorry about that, but I hope you understand how I put 2 and 2 together and came up with 5. The coincidence between my question and the bombardment was extremely strange, but a coincidence nevertheless.

      If anything, it was me who damaged your blog by angrily suggesting that people steer clear of it, and for that I apologise unreservedly as well. I hope I undid the damage by apologising on your blog the next day (or two) and I am doing so here, now.

      The reason I said that you could get nasty after a couple of drinks is because you have done just that in the past - the quite distant past (about a year ago, I think - some spat between another blogger and you on my site) - so I had thought you had done it again, for the above reasons. I still apologise for that again, though. I should never have said it, but really thought that the 'Tracey's Scraps' blog was yours, because it seemed to be written by someone with a different name than Tracey. I am guessing that her blog was hi-jacked and out of her control, so I reported her URL to Google. No harm done to your URL under the circumstances. I hope you can accept this for what it is.

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    2. First of all, I don't get nasty when I drink, I don;t drink and blog and really don;t drink often. Secondly I have never been in a spat with any other blogger on your site. I have been snippy with you on occasion, but that is about the worst of it.

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    3. Oh, then maybe I have - once again - confused you with someone else, but I can't be arsed to trawl back through the posts to find out. I'm leaving it at that.

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    4. being angry after a bit of booze......?
      That does not happen on tis blog does it tom?
      not EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    5. You shut yer gob, bitch (John - lol). If I remember rightly, I was defending you when the said drunken rant was being perpetrated. I don't want to have to go back through a year's worth of comments in order to put you in your place, but if I have to, I might.

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    6. off you go
      an thomas you will uncover a load of posts where your have been a cunt!
      ok an entertaining cunt
      but certainly a cunt xxxx
      lol
      lol
      smiley face

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    7. Your last post was called 'delete' wasn't it? (lol - if lols can be had...)

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  8. I have nothing to top your rather fantastic tale. Your friend who accidentally dropped his child and it resulted in a fracture may possibly have faced the social services department here. They have way too much power.

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    1. He certainly did face the Social Services, because - only a week or so later - his son broke his arm in an innocent accident, and the hospital set off the alarm bells. I think that - in this case - Social Services were quite right to investigate, and would have been failing in their duty not to!

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  9. Our former vicar took his newborn baby in her pram for a walk. His wife had given him a list to take to the corner grocery shop and admonished him to read the list carefully as he was apt to be a bit careless and absent minded. As it was just a small shop and in a quiet neighbourhood he parked the pram outside the door and did a quick shop. When he got home he very proudly told his wife that he had managed to get everything on the list. She looked at him for a moment and said, 'Then where is the baby?' Sure enough he'd left her in her pram at the shop where he was able to safely retrieve her...

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  10. Well I don't think I have done anything to a child but my older brother who was 15 at the time was looking after me during the summer holidays. I was 5. He would lock me in a hall closet and go off to do stuff with his friends.

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  11. The worst was undoubtedly sending my son off to Boarding School at the age of 8 - I should have known better. Luckily he hated it and had the sense to run away towards home - I never sent him back but now forty years later I still have a sense of guilt.
    I have just read another Alexander McCall Smith Scotland Street novel and just love dear Bertie in them - his mother is a fiend. Do youknow the stories?

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    1. No Weaver, But I cannot stand 'Number 1 ladies detective agency', so I don't think I would. At least your boy ran away.

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  12. Didn't you risk your daughter's life trying to cross crashing waves with her in a stroller once Tom? Sounds right up there to me.

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    1. Oops - I seem to have conveniently forgotten that, but yes, I did!

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  13. With regards to ugly babies, Barbara Walters admitted to using the standard exclamation: "Now THAT'S a baby!" when faced with a particularly ugly one.

    I cannot stand "Number 1 ladies detective agency" either. I just read it in hopes that it might get better as I read along. It didn't.

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    1. "Now THAT'S one hell of a mother!" would have been good too, eh?

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