To ask your biggest parenting fails to make me feel better about mine today

[GlummyMcGlummerson]

I feel so guilty I could vomit. I’ve been sobbing all day (I know, I need to get a grip).

Taking DS (2) to nursery, as usual I put my handbag on the passenger seat of my car (which has the keyless entry and a stop/start button rather than an ignition) then strapped him in behind the passenger seat. Then, as usual, shut his door to walk round to the drivers’ side. This has never been an issue - it’s easier than keeping hold of my key in my hand while I strap a wriggling toddler into a car seat - but today for some reason the car locked itself. Long story short, the fire brigade had to come out and smash a window. DS has been in the car for about 20 minutes at his point and was seriously distressed. He’s fine now, but I’m a mess. I wouldn’t usually call emergency service BTW I did initially call the AA but they said up to 60 minutes and they couldn’t get hold of the nearest mechanic. There’s no way I was letting him stay there for so long.

I told my mum and she was horrified, told me to expect social services on my doorstep ready to take him away in the meantime I have ordered a spare key (at £235, thank god for Christmas bonus) and a new car window comes Friday (Merry arsing Christmas to me)

In the vain hope of me feeling less shit please regale me with anything similar you’ve done, please say it’s not just me!

I was a child who had to be rescued by the fire brigade in a similar situation when I was 3. I can assure you I suffered no lasting effects from the experience and was not traumatised.

I was told when I was older how upset and worried everyone was, and reacting similarly to you really. Which was a surprise to me as my main memories are of getting to see fire fighters and being given biscuits while everyone made a fuss of me, which was all great fun!

If I was frightened or distressed I don't remember it. Eventually it just became a funny family story.

Please don't beat yourself up over this.

I locked my ds in the car in similar circumstances. The security guy in the shop used a coat hanger to force the car window. Nightmare 🤦‍♀️

Loads of similar incidents happened. We are only human. Hope you feel better.

Last weekend I managed to trap DS’s toe in the mechanism of our sofa bed. This was minutes before he was leaving to go to rugby practice. I made him go.
DH carried DS upside down up the stairs, tripped and slammed DS face onto edge of a step. The amount of blood was phenomenal and his lip and nose swelled up almost instantly. A & E for that one.
Playing hide and seek with both DCs and I hid behind the shed. As they walked around the shed looking for me, I kept going forward so I was always hidden from view. They then went to search in the house. Next thing I knew they came racing out crying hysterically because they couldn’t find me! Took ages to calm them down. They were 5 and 2.
DS stomped off in a huff and decided to shut himself in our bedroom cupboard. It’s a built-in cupboard and locks from the outside. He was able to fit his fingers under the door and pull it closed behind him and trapped himself inside. We could hear a muffled banging but didn’t think anything of it until I finally heard the anguished scream for help. He still worries about getting locked in.
I dropped my iPad onto DS’s toe. The edge of it hit his big toe nail square on and it sort of exploded. The toe. Not the iPad. Off to A&E again

Poor DS. 😐

My son got stuck in the curly slide at soft play. (I later found it it's the largest bloody curly slide in Europe). All the wee kids come out the bottom crying - it's two storeys high, pitch black and a very shallow slide so you don't slide if you're small.

I'm hugely claustrophobic and although he was crying my name, just couldn't fucking get in it, started panicking when I even got near it. I had to ask my friend to rescue him. Which she did, but I should have gone.

I've never forgiven myself, tbh.

My not funny one.

When DS was little I was cutting his nails and cut a sliver out of his thumb. He still has a scar. He screamed and I felt AWFUL. We've all done things like that.

My silly one that will hopefully make you laugh.

This was years later, we'd been on a very long countryside walk and we were all pretty tired. We were walking back to the car.

We had to cross a fairly busy road that was on a difficult bend so I was worried about us not being seen.

DS was holding my hand but he was messing about, dancing a jig. He was also making duck noises, but instead of saying 'quack quack quack' he was doing it more onomatopoetically, sort of 'waak, waak, waak'.

I was irritated because I felt he wasn't paying attention and would possibly slip out of my hand on the dangerous road.

I wanted to say 'Walk sensibly'.

I wanted to say 'Stop Waaking'.

But it all came out wrong and for some reason I bellowed out

STOP WANKING!!!!

He looked up at me in innocent confusion. I was laughing so hard I had to stop walking once we'd crossed the road.

No lasting negative effects at least. I still find it amusing.

Yeah your mum is a dick. Imagine being the kind of parent who wants to stick the boot in to their own child when they've had a horrible experience? Horrid.

My friend is scared of bees. She was pushing her then baby DS in his pram and a bee flew into her path. She abandoned the pram and ran off. The pram started rolling down the hill and was stopped by a fairly horrified passer by. Her DS didn't even wake up but friend felt awful.

Op no one gets through raising kids without something like this happening, it’s not possible!

My worst one was earlier this year. Dd and I were late for nursery/work and I was on the phone to work whilst getting dd out the door in the pram. My front door has a path bit and then 4 steep stone steps down to the pavement. I thought I’d put the brake on the buggy, turned around to lock the door. Hear an almighty clatter and dd is face first on the stone steps stuck in the pram, with a huge bleeding gash on her forehead. She was absolutely fine after having it glued, but I was a weeping wreck for about a week afterwards.

I've just remembered two!

First one. I was sitting in my living room and my 3 year old was driving around the house on his wee ride on car. My living room is along the hall from my kitchen, which then opens out onto the deck, so you can see the decking from the living room window. So he was driving around, I was looking out the window. Then he rolled on through to the kitchen, and I saw him appear on the deck because I hadn't locked the back door. I ran straight round but by the time I'd gotten there, he'd rolled himself down the deck steps and landed head first. Had to have his head glued but was fine.

Two years later, when he was 5, my mum lost him in IKEA. I was with my youngest and she had my oldest. I got back from what I was looking at to find her measuring a bed. I asked "where's oldest son?" He had run off whilst she wasnt looking. That was an horrific 10 minutes, but we found him in the childrens bit playing with the soft toys after running through every bloody section and grabbing staff members as I went.

Haven't rtft, but just wanted to say our car (old and secondhand) also only has one key, and my sympathies! Only thing I'd possibly have done differently would be smashing the window in myself. As per your request:

• put 10 month old crawling child on bed, got distracted, child fell off no shit Sherlock!
• drove for an hour and a half with only one of the two isofix connectors actually connected
• took vomiting child to A&E only to be told he had outrageous oral thrush and hadn't we noticed?

When I was two I fell down an entire flight of stairs because my dad hadn't closed the stair gate properly. Friend's baby got hold of some cleaning products and when she was on the phone to 111 she fell off her lap and smacked her head on the coffee table.

Your mum's comments were unhelpful to say the least. Was it shock or is she always like this? Social services will not remove him (or even contact you), they have better things to do.

Apart from my earlier transgression mentioned up thread, the incident which bothers me most is when we parked on a busy road to go to a party. My 5 year old dd was holding my hand and I was going on and on so much about being careful near roads that she panicked and let go of my hand and dashed across the road as I looked on in horror.

She’s now 15 and I’ve never forgotten it.

This is your mum’s parenting fail, not yours! You did everything right. I was chatting to an AA man once who told me that when they’re called out to child accidentally locked in car, some customers give the AA ppl attitude when they say they need to break the window to get the child out. Now that really really is shocking parenting priorities

(Same AA man told me that ppl accidentally locking pets/children in cars is a very very common call out)

dd1 has severe asthma, one night when she was 12 it was playing up, the next morning I said that at least it hadn't got bad enough for her to wake me in the night, she looked at me oddly. It turned out she'd come in about 1:30am to say she was having an attack and I had sat up looked at her and said"fuck off and go back to bed"!!!, I had absolutely no recollection of it and thankfully dd1 was fine and found it highly amusing that I had sworn at her in my slee

Your mum is super mean OP. Once all is calmed down it will be a take to tell your ds I'm sure!
Not my parent fail but my dad cba to actually parent me so when we went to the supermarket he'd leave me by the sweets aisle to look after me . One day he was supposed to do a proper shop so I'd been there ages. Just chilling in the sweet aisle must have been about 7years old. After a while I really started wondering where he'd got to so started wondering around, as I got to the front of the store I saw him drive past outside
I remember feeling so rubbish that he'd forgotten me. Apparently he got home and my mum asked where I was and he promptly put his jacket back on without a word and returned to collect me!!!

When they were at primary school, my DC used to head off on their scooters and wait at the end of the cul de sac for me - you couldn’t quite see the end of the cul de sac from the front door.
One day I locked up behind them and left, but they weren’t at the end of the cul de sac??? I looked around for a bit and then went back home to check and sure enough there were two little faces peering through the glass on the front door wondering why they been left behind when I went to work!

Tale *

Toddler DD2 pissing about with preschooler DD1 just before bedtime. DD2 fell and cried. I shouted at both.
Put DDs into bed. DD2 whinging about leg...I kissed it better.
Next morning DD2 can't put weight on leg.. took to a&e...
broken
The night before

I was the senior sister in the same department...

Crap mum
Crap nurse

My sweet son was about 6 yrs old. We had a play date with friends scheduled at a park. This was during the summer and fairly warm. He started complaining immediately that he was hot and his stomach hurt.

I thought he just wanted to rush home and play on his iPad. I insisted he was fine, gave him lots of water and went of to chat with my friend.

I looked over to see him vomiting on the ground. I rushed over to get him. He looked at me with his sad brown eyes and said “Mummy, I really don’t feel well”.

By the time we got home he had a fever and rash. He was ill for a week.

He still brings this up because he knows it makes me feel terrible. I suppose he will be telling the tale to his grandchildren.

When I was pregnant with dd we moved house 5 weeks before she was due. I also finished work and about a week later I was completely exhausted. I brought my 4 year old son home and sat down in the armchair. He told me he was going for a poo....

I woke up with a start and the house was mega quiet..eerily so.

I shouted his name frantically and ran around the house.

At the top of the stairs I heard the bathroom extractor fan going and pushed my way into the bathroom.
DS was lying asleep on the floor.

I woke him and he told me he had shouted me for ages as he couldn’t get the door open so he eventually passed out. The door was stiff and he wasn’t used to it as it was a new house

I discovered I had been sleeping for an hour

A doctor fail rather than a parenting fail, but many moons ago, during my GP training, I was sent on a home visit to a housebound elderly lady, She couldn't move around by herself, and had carers in every morning and evening, who used her key safe to enter the property.

To get into her house, I too used the key safe, but when I left, I forgot to take the key out with me and thus inadvertently locked the patient inside her own house .

I had to shout through the letterbox to let her know what was going on, and then had to wait two hours for a locksmith to arrive.

At least it gave my trainer a laugh.

(My point being, locks are pesky things and get the better of all of us at the worst possible times)

I’ve done it too. I’m in Australia and the first option on our roadside assistance line is “press one of you have a child or pet locked in the car?” so I figure it must happen a lot! Don’t feel bad, what matters is you got him out safely.

I did the exact same thing when my daughter was 2 years old. She was in there about 15 mins when I found a packet of chocolate buttons in my bag and waved them at her, she summoned all her little strength to wiggle out of the straps. She was calm and that’s the only thing that made me hold it together so I didn’t distress her. It’s a truly horrible feeling but just a mistake so please don’t spend any longer making yourself feel awful. My daughter is 8 now and I can confirm not traumatised nor removed by social services!