Am I the asshole for pulling my granddaughter out of daycare without telling her parents first?
I (60F) watch Penny three days a week while my daughter Kristen (34F) and her husband Dale (37M) work. The other two days, Penny goes to Sunshine Kids on Route 9 – a place Kristen picked, paid the deposit on, and talks about like it’s some kind of miracle. Penny just turned four. She’s been going there eight months.
I’ve been around kids my whole life. I raised three of my own and helped raise two of my sister’s. I know what a happy four-year-old looks like and I know what a scared one looks like, even when they can’t tell you why.
About six weeks ago, Penny started doing something new. Every Sunday night before a daycare day, she’d get quiet. Not tired-quiet. Something else. She stopped eating dinner. She started asking to sleep in Kristen’s bed. Once she told me her tummy hurt “all the time” and when I asked where, she put both hands over her chest, not her stomach.
I mentioned it to Kristen. Twice. She said it was probably a phase, that Penny’s teacher Miss Amber was wonderful, that all the other parents loved the place.
Last Tuesday I picked Penny up early – Kristen had a dentist thing, asked me to get her at 2 instead of 5. When I walked in, the front desk woman wasn’t at her desk. I could hear the kids in the back room.
I heard Penny before I saw her.
She wasn’t crying. It was quieter than crying.
I pushed through the door and I saw what was happening in that room, and my whole body went cold.
I picked Penny up, got her coat, and walked out. I didn’t sign anything. I didn’t say a word to anyone. I drove straight home and I called Kristen.
Kristen didn’t answer. Dale did. And the first thing he said to me was, “You had NO right to do that without calling us first. You could have just ASKED what was going on before you – “
I said, “Dale. Listen to me. I need you to come over right now.”
He went quiet for a second. Then he said –
What Dale Said
“Is Penny okay?”
Not angry anymore. Just a father.
I told him she was fine. That she was sitting on my couch with a juice box and the TV on and she’d eaten half a sleeve of crackers. I told him she was okay in the way a kid is okay when the scary thing is over and they don’t fully understand yet that the scary thing was real.
He said he’d be there in twenty minutes. He called Kristen on the way.
They showed up together. Kristen still had the paper bib from the dentist crumpled in her coat pocket. She walked in and went straight to Penny, and Penny climbed into her lap like she was trying to get back inside her. Didn’t say a word. Just held on.
Dale looked at me over Kristen’s head. He didn’t say anything either.
I sat down across from them and I told them what I saw.
What Was Happening in That Room
There were eleven kids in that back room. It was nap time, or what Sunshine Kids called nap time, which apparently meant the lights off and the shades pulled and the kids on their little mats on the floor.
Miss Amber wasn’t there. There was a different woman, someone I’d never seen at pickup, heavyset, maybe late twenties, sitting in the corner on her phone. Not watching. Not present. Just there in the physical sense.
Penny was in the far corner of the room, behind a shelving unit with plastic bins of craft supplies. She’d pushed herself into the gap between the shelf and the wall. She was sitting with her knees up and her arms around her knees and she was rocking. Slow. Back and forth. Not making a sound.
That’s what I heard from the hallway. Not crying. The sound of a child who has figured out that crying doesn’t help.
I don’t know exactly how long she’d been doing it. I don’t know if it was that day only or if it was every Tuesday and Thursday for however many weeks. I don’t know what happened to make her feel like she needed to hide behind a shelf. I didn’t stay long enough to ask anyone.
I know what I saw.
I picked her up and she grabbed my neck with both hands and she didn’t let go until we were in the car.
Kristen’s Face
Kristen didn’t say anything for a long time after I finished talking.
Dale had his elbows on his knees. He was staring at the carpet, jaw working.
Penny had fallen asleep in Kristen’s lap. Completely out, the way small kids go sometimes, like someone cut a string. One hand still gripping Kristen’s sleeve.
Kristen finally said, “She never told me.”
I said, “She’s four. She doesn’t have the words.”
“She could have said she was scared. She could have said she didn’t want to go.”
I thought about Sunday nights. The quiet. The hands pressed to her chest when I asked where it hurt.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.
Kristen looked at me then, really looked, and her face did something I haven’t seen it do since she was a teenager. She just came apart. Not loud. She pressed her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook and she held Penny tighter, and Dale put his arm around her, and I sat there across from them and let it happen.
The Part Where Dale Apologized
He did it about an hour later, after Kristen had taken Penny to the bathroom and they’d gotten her coat back on and were getting ready to go home.
He came over to where I was standing in the kitchen and he said, “I was out of line on the phone.”
I said, “You were scared.”
He said, “I still shouldn’t have come at you like that.”
I told him I’d have said the same thing in his position. A stranger calls and says they’ve taken your kid somewhere without asking. Your first instinct isn’t going to be calm. He’s a good father. His instinct was right, it was just pointed at the wrong person.
He nodded. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
“What do we do now,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
I told him that was up to them. That Penny wasn’t going back to Sunshine Kids, obviously, but everything after that was their call. I’d take her the extra two days if they needed time to find somewhere else. I’d take her all five days if that’s what it came to. Whatever they needed.
He said, “You shouldn’t have to do that.”
I said, “She’s my granddaughter. I don’t have to. I want to.”
What Kristen Did the Next Morning
She called the center. She asked to speak to the director, a woman named Patrice who Kristen had met at the enrollment tour eight months ago and described to me as “so warm, so professional.”
Patrice told Kristen that Miss Amber had been out sick for the past three weeks and that a substitute had been covering her class. Kristen asked why no parents had been notified. Patrice said it wasn’t their policy to inform parents of temporary staff changes.
Kristen asked for the name of the substitute who was in the room on Tuesday. Patrice said she couldn’t share staff information.
Kristen asked how many children were in that class. Patrice said eleven.
Kristen asked what the staff-to-child ratio was supposed to be per state licensing requirements for four-year-olds. There was a pause. Patrice said she’d have to look into that.
One adult with eleven four-year-olds, lights off, shades pulled, in a room where a child had been hiding behind a shelf long enough to learn that no one was coming.
Kristen called the state licensing board after she hung up. She filed a complaint. She found out two other families from that same class had filed complaints in the past month, both citing inadequate supervision.
I don’t know what happens to Sunshine Kids after that. I don’t know if anything does.
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
Six weeks.
Penny had been doing the Sunday night thing for six weeks before I walked into that room. Six weeks of not eating dinner, of asking to sleep in Kristen’s bed, of pressing her hands to her chest when I asked where it hurt.
I mentioned it to Kristen twice and Kristen told me it was a phase.
I’m not saying that to blame her. Kristen is a good mother. She trusted a place she’d vetted, paid for, believed in. She had no reason to think anything was wrong. And four-year-olds do go through phases. Clingy phases, quiet phases, phases where everything is scary for no reason anyone can name.
But I’ve been around kids my whole life. I raised three. I helped raise two more.
I know the difference.
I just didn’t push hard enough the second time. I let Kristen’s certainty override what I was seeing because she’s the parent and it’s her call and I know how it goes when grandmothers push too hard on things like this. I know how that story ends.
So I backed off.
And Penny spent six more weeks learning how to make herself small in a corner and wait.
That’s the part that stays with me. Not Dale’s voice on the phone, not Patrice and her policy on staff notifications. Just Penny behind that shelf. The slow rocking. The silence of a kid who has stopped expecting anyone to come.
She’s at my house now, all five days. She ate a full breakfast this morning. She asked me to play the card game where you match the animals, and we played it four times in a row and she won three of them, and when she won she did the thing where she throws both arms straight up like a referee.
She’s fine. She will be fine.
But I’m going to be a lot louder the third time.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on. Someone else might need to hear it.
For more intense family drama, discover what happened when my brother showed up at my door after six years or the heartbreaking story of my mom walking into the shelter where I work. And if you’re looking for another perplexing situation, read about the time I called the cops on the bikers outside the women’s shelter.
