There’s a mugshot of me floating around the internet. Tired eyes, hair a mess, mascara halfway down my face. People who saw it decided I was the unhinged one. The mom who lost it and attacked a sweet daycare worker over nothing.
What none of those comments said is that I’d reported that same daycare three times before anybody put cuffs on me.
My son is Eli. He was three. The first time I noticed the bruise, I was getting him ready for bath. It ran along his ribs on the right side, this ugly yellow-purple line, and he flinched when my fingers got close. I asked him what happened and he just said “ow” and looked at the floor. I took eleven pictures on my phone that night. I filed the report in March.
The investigator who came out was nice enough. Clipboard, soft voice, asked Eli a couple of questions he was too little to really answer. He wrote down that toddlers fall, that kids bruise easy, that there were no other signs. A few weeks later I got the letter. Insufficient evidence. Case closed. I remember reading it standing at the mailbox and feeling stupid, like maybe I really was one of those paranoid moms.
Then May happened. Same side. Same rib cage. A fresh bruise sitting almost exactly where the last one had been. Kids don’t fall the same way twice in the same spot, not like that. I filed again, photos and all. I even circled the location on a printout so they couldn’t say it was random. Same process. Same nice voice. Same letter a month later. Closed.
I noticed the name at the bottom of both letters was the same. The same state inspector signed off on both reviews. I didn’t think much of it then. I do now.
September is when it stopped being about bruises. Eli just quit talking. Not slow, not gradual. One day he was telling me about a truck on a cartoon, the next day nothing. He’d point at the fridge instead of asking for juice. He’d grab my hand and pull me to what he wanted. And bedtime turned into this thing I still hear when I close my eyes, him screaming, full panic, every single night when I’d say it was time to sleep. No words. Just screaming. Our pediatrician used the word “regression” and asked if anything had changed at daycare.
