Add Department of Social Services to the list.....

I may have mentioned it before, but I have not necessarily been the model citizen in my 29 years on this earth. I have done my fair share of crap, I have been arrested and I spent the night in jail (non-violent or drug related activities thank you). That being said, I would NEVER harm a child. Not mine, not anyone else's.

However, my son's Pre-K teacher thinks differently. Picture this, I'm at my place of work--a LAW office--and we have a deposition starting in 10 minutes. I just went meet the plaintiff attorney and the plaintiff and talked to them for a while. (Side note: the attorney told me on the phone yesterday that his client, "was two tacos shy of a combination platter." and he was right.) Moving on, I get back to my desk and my co-worker tells me that I left my cell phone on. Oops. So I check it, expecting it to be Keith, but it's some weird number that i've never seen before. So I call it back and it's H. M. with Department of Social Services and he needs me and my husband to come into his office ASAP because someone has brought a complaint of child abuse against us because of the bruising on Nicolas' body. Can you say DISTRAUGHT??? I couldn't function. I went in my boss' office and shut the door and immediately broke down. He is such an awesome man...he had his daughters ring ceremony at work and he told me that if he needed me to he would come with me and miss that. He tried to reassure me that it was all routine and something they had to do but everything would be ok because it was obviously not true. He told me to stay in his office as long as I needed and he would leave me in there so I could talk on the phone privately.

Now let me tell you about Nicolas. He will be 5 on Monday. He is less than 3 feet tall and weighs 26 pounds. He's just tiny. But he THINKS that he is as big as his big brother and can do whatever he does. He plays tackle football, he wrestles, and he literally bounces off the floor and walls. He is covered in bruises from head to toe. But they are "little boy" bruises from being such a rough and tumble kid. NOT bruises from abuse.

So Keith and I go to the Department of Social Services. We are interviewed and "in order for the child to stay in the home we have to come up with an 'alternative discipline program'" Leave it to my husband to use this situation to get cocky. He tells the lady that he just won't discipline them anymore and let them take a gun to school when he's 15 and shoot people. I died. Literally, I think my heart stopped beating and I died for a second right there on the spot. The lady told us to hold on and she was going to get the supervisor. I just knew that was the end.

Now, you may wonder why I am writing this for the world to see, but it's more of a public service announcement. Obviously, this can happen to ANY parent and happens frequently with educators. Now, they didn't outright tell us that it was his teacher, but based on the conversations we made the logical assumption that it was her. The bruise that got us called in there was on his butt. Now I asked the lady what anyone was doing looking at my child's butt, and why wasn't one of his parents present when he was checked out. Since she couldn't tell me who called it in she couldn't explain that one to me. But now I have to make the decision of going to the school and opening a can of worms. My kids have many years left at this school and while I don't think beyond a shadow of a doubt that the teacher is NOT a child molester, it still concerns me. They are PRe-K and maybe she was helping a little boy out in the bathroom or something while Nic was peeing. That would be the only acceptable explanation to me.

Anyway, the supervisor at DSS comes in and she is hilarious. She is down to earth and she makes us feel comfortable, or me at least. Now, here's where the public service announcement comes in. DSS does allow spanking. And they encourage you to spank them. She even told us that if we felt they needed to be spanked, because sometimes kids do, that we could use a ruler. They have to come in when the abuse leaves marks, such as bruises. But if there are no marks or bruises they can't do anything about it. And, so say, bruises and paint stirrers don't leave marks. She assured us that they would get an "outsider opinion" from someone and then close their files because it obviously wasn't a case of abuse. But goddamnit I still feel like I somehow did something wrong and now people will be looking at my kids closely and monitoring our parenting skills. While I'm glad that educators are looking out for stuff, I'm not super excited that someone would think that I'm a child abuser.

In other news, I finally got things cleared up with the bank today.