Hiding Place Exposes Parent’s Secret Fears

My daughter has what she calls a secret hiding place in the small park near our home.

This place doesn’t exactly beckon me. A canopy of branches hangs so low that even a 5-year-old has to duck before she can take cover. The sun never enters here.

The place is cold, the ground slopes, and sitting is not advised. Leaves, sometimes wet and slippery, are strewn about.

I have never entered this sanctuary myself.

Still, I like it. Or rather, I like the idea of it. I am happy that in a suburban park mostly covered with grass, with half a basketball court, with swings and a rather elaborate, twisting slide, there is a place for secretive kids.

My own childhood secret hiding place, isolated in a real sense, had a stream with clam shells sprinkled along its shore. Sometimes I’d bring friends, and they would be properly awed.

This place was mystical, not too sunny itself, and far more hidden than my daughter’s creepy spot by the water fountain backing a neighbor’s fence.

Yet if my daughter were to trek to such a hiding place, she’d have hell to pay. In 1992, paranoia is an environmental hazard of the business that I’m in.

Besides, I figured my daughter’s secret place wasn’t too shabby a faux adventure for a modern suburban kid.

But now I’ve told her never to go there again. The truth is, I am more alarmed by this development than is she.

It appears that somebody--or could there be more?--has begun to use the hiding place as a toilet. I asked my daughter how she could be sure. Surely an animal, I assumed. How did she know it wasn’t a dog?

Simple, my daughter explained. Dogs have no use for the stained T-shirt that had been left behind. Her tone was very matter-of-fact, without any suggestion of incredulity, nothing like, “Mommy, why would anybody do that there?”

Really, that is what I wanted to hear. I wanted some sort of realization that something was amiss, a symbolic protest about yet another liberty reined in “because it’s not safe.”

Instead, the child simply moved on. “That’s OK,” she said. “ ‘Cause I found another, really neat, beauuutiful place. It is soooo neat, with trees and everything.”

“Great,” I said, or if not that, something equally lame. And I didn’t quite move on.

The “not in my neighborhood” refrain started resonating through my brain. This is the anyplace-but-here sentiment of the insulated middle class. I hear this all the time. It is a gasp of shock followed by an indignant attempt to draw a line over which “bad things” may not cross.

Except the bad things usually come, even as we tell ourselves that drugs, homelessness, gangs and constant crime are the big-ticket scourges of someplace else: the inner cities, the wrong side of the tracks.

Yes, these are the conclusions to which the mind leaps, like a projectile shot into space, over something as mundane as this discovery in the park. I mean, what if it was a dog?

But as soon as my husband walked through the door, I told him the news. Not about my daughter’s beautiful new hiding place, of course, but about the besmirched refuge of old. Suddenly, I loved that creepy haunt, or rather, the romanticized notion of a childhood safe place. Such notions are withering inch by inch.

“Wonderful, now we have a bum,” were my husband’s words.

Then he warned his daughter about disease and pestilence of the societal ilk, and he told her to never, ever go in the secret hiding place again. He shook his head in disgust. There was no discussion of the beautiful new hide-out at all. He walked off, opening a bill.

Needless to say, we don’t know what we have at the neighborhood park. Exaggeration can be a sport in our otherwise tranquil lives.

The reality is we are ignoring the latest threat, real or imagined, to the sanctity of our mythical suburbia and the memories we would like to preserve. We have enough on our minds, like work mostly, and bills. And if it is big-time trouble we’re after, there is no shortage of places to look.

So I thought this was all safely tucked away, analyzed to death, until I drove home from the office the other day. There, shirtless and slumped over a picnic table, was a young man in the park whom I had never seen before.

I walked to retrieve the mail from the box at the curb, my heels clicking loudly against the sidewalk, and I stared all the while. From the visitor there was no response.

Then while I was inside, changing the baby’s diaper, I heard the doorbell ring. I yelled at my 5-year-old not to answer the door. I sounded a little shrill.

When I came to open the door myself, I saw it was one of my daughter’s playmates. She wanted to know if my daughter could come out to play in the park. I told her maybe another time, honey, that it was really too late today. My daughter, meantime, didn’t understand.

She got angry with me, and then she cried.