Women's Safety USA

If You Have a Daughter, Please Read This ☝️

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I've been a detective for 16 years, and I found out predators are picking kids from their SCHOOL PICTURES. When I told my husband, he said and I am quoting him, "You're obsessed, Rebecca. Not every man is a monster." Then he sent our 13 year old to talk to the new school counselor. About me. Then he emailed that counselor himself to say things were hard at home. Five weeks later that counselor was waiting behind the gas station by her school, and Lily was walking to his car. I want to tell you what happened after that, because it is the reason I am typing any of this. Let me back up. My name is Rebecca. I'm 41. I have been a detective in Dallas for 16 years. My daughter is Lily. She's 13, she's in eighth grade, and she sings alto in the school choir. My husband is Greg. We have been married 15 years. I need to say something about Greg first, because if you are picturing some guy who does not care about his kid, you have the wrong picture and the rest of this will not land. Greg is the reason our house works. I work whenever somebody's kid does not come home, which in a city this size is any hour of any day. Greg runs the parts counter at a truck dealership and he is home by 4:30, every single day. He has been to every parent teacher conference Lily has ever had. He learned to French braid off YouTube when she was 6 so she would not go to school with her hair a mess. Every Saturday since she was 5, he has taken her fishing off the pier at the lake, and they stop at the bait shop after for gas station donuts. When Lily has a bad day, she goes and sits on the tailgate of his truck while he fixes something, and neither of them says anything, and she comes back in better. He is the parent who is there. I know that. Everybody knows that. And Greg has decided I am obsessed. Not cruelly. Greg has never said a cruel thing to me in 15 years. It is the little sigh. It is "Bec." Just my name, short, with his hand on the back of my neck, the way he says it when I am still at the kitchen table at midnight with a case file open. Here is the thing, though. I am not an obsessed mother. I have seen what I have seen at work, and Lily still walks home from school by herself. She has a phone. She goes to the lake with her best friend's family. She rides her bike to the library. I let her be 13. The one thing I am strict about is the grown-ups. Every coach, every teacher, every mom whose house she sleeps at. I look them up. It is a cop habit, and every mom I know does her own version of it with a Google search. I did not think it was a big ask. I do not have a story. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to Lily. I just have other people's stories. I have brought 63 kids home in 16 years. I have reunited families in the lobby of my own station. And those kids are never the same. This past school year I worked more missing kids than I can count. 6 of them would not leave me alone. Different ages. 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, and 16. Different neighborhoods. Different schools. I put their files side by side on my kitchen table one night, and I could not stop seeing it. Every one of them had their school picture taken on picture day, in the first weeks of school. Every one of them was gone before the end of that same school year. And every one of them had a new grown-up at school that year. A coach. A substitute. A bus driver. A counselor. A different job every time. The kids I brought home all told me the same thing, in their own words. He asked about home. He asked what their parents were like. Then he waited until they had a fight with a parent. Then he told them how smart they were, and how much better their life would be without their parents. Then he offered them somewhere to go. What happened to them after that, I am not going to put on the internet. And here is the part I could not get past. I called the picture company. A very nice woman told me who sees a school picture. The photographer. The editor. The database. The yearbook rep. The yearbook teacher. The front office. School security. Anybody who buys a yearbook. At least 10 people, she said, for every kid. Somebody besides the parents and the photographer gets to see those pictures. In 4 of my 6 files, the picture company had a second download of that kid's picture. Not the parents. An account the company would not tell me anything about without a warrant. And I could not get a warrant, because I did not have a case. I had a pattern. I took it to my lieutenant. He listened for about four minutes. Then he said, "Kids make things up, Rebecca. You know that." That was the end of it at work. It was not the end of it at home. I kept the files at the kitchen table. I read them at night after Lily went to bed. And when picture day came around again this year, I stood in the kitchen and watched her practice her smile in the hallway mirror, and I did not say one word. A few weeks after picture day, Lily's school got a new counselor. Mr. Dale. I looked him up, the way I look up everybody. No record. Good references. He came from a district down in Houston. Clean. They are always clean. He started pulling Lily out of math to check in. Just checking in. He asked how things were at home. I asked her what he wanted. She said, "Nothing. I'm fine. He's just nice." She has said I'm fine to me since she could talk. That night I told Greg. I said a new grown-up started at her school a few weeks after picture day, and he is pulling her out of class to ask about home, and that is my pattern, Greg. That is my whole pattern. He looked at the files on the table. Then he looked at me. Then he said the thing I put at the top. "You're obsessed, Rebecca. Not every man is a monster." I did not have anything to say to that. That is the part I need you to understand. He was not being mean. He was worried about me. And there is something in it that is true. I was at the kitchen table at midnight. I had missed two of Lily's choir rehearsals for work that month and one dinner with his mom. Not every man is a monster. That is true. Most of them are not. And all I had was 6 files and a picture day. The next morning Greg told Lily she should go talk to Mr. Dale. About me. "Your mom's got a lot on her plate right now, Lil. It might help to have somebody to talk to. That's what he's there for." Then he emailed Mr. Dale himself. He showed me after, like it was a nice thing he had done. It said Rebecca has been working a lot and she is pretty wrapped up in a case, and things have been a little hard at home, and Lily could use somebody to talk to. Things have been a little hard at home. My husband put that in writing, to a man I did not know, about our 13 year old. I said nothing to anybody. That night I sat in my car in the driveway with the engine off and cried with my hand over my mouth, which is where I have done all my crying since I made detective. Here is what actually happened after that, and it is the thing nobody in my house understood. The counselor was not the problem by himself. The problem is that a grown man who started at her school a few weeks after picture day now had her out of class twice a week, and an email from her own father telling him things were hard at home, and my daughter telling him the rest. He knew I worked late. He knew Greg did not get home until 4:30. He knew she walked home alone. School lets out at 3:05. Lily walks home, about half a mile, past the gas station on the corner by the service road, and lets herself in at about 3:25. Then she is by herself until Greg pulls in at 4:30. I am almost never home before six. Some nights I am not home before midnight. I asked the principal if they could call me before anybody pulled Lily out of class. She said, very kindly, "Mr. Dale is a mandated reporter, Rebecca. If something is going on at home, we would want him to know." If something is going on at home. I asked my lieutenant, one more time, if I could at least run the counselor through the state system. He said, "Is there a case?" I said no. He said, "Then leave the man alone, and take a couple days off." I asked Lily if she would stop going to Mr. Dale for a while. Just for a while. "Mom, he's literally the only person who listens to me. You're obsessed." My own daughter said the word. She was not being mean. She was tired. Her mom was never home, and the one grown-up at school who asked how she was doing was the one her mom wanted gone. And every afternoon after that I was one of two things. Either the detective who walks into a middle school with no case, pulls her own daughter's counselor into the hall, loses her badge, and proves to my lieutenant, my husband and that whole school that I am exactly what Greg told them. Or the woman at her desk at 3:20, with Lily's dot in one window on her screen and a missing girl's school picture in the other. That is the choice I had, and it is not a choice. And I could not say one word more about it, because every objection I had now had a diagnosis attached to it before it left my mouth. Greg had handed my whole life a word for me, and the word was obsessed, and he said it with his hand on the back of my neck, and that made it worse. About a week later I started seeing it. Not an ad. I mean I saw the ad eventually and I know exactly how that sounds. I mean I started seeing women. One of our dispatchers had a pink one clipped to her lanyard. I asked her what it was. She said, "SheSafe. I walk to my car at 2 in the morning. Half the women in this building have one." Then a video of a girl at a bus stop setting something off, and 6 people coming out of a store behind her, and 400 thousand likes underneath it. The caption just said SheSafe and a pink heart. Then a mom in the choir parents group, from Lily's own school, saying she had bought 3 SheSafes, one for each of her girls. It was everywhere for about two weeks and then I could not stop seeing it. And here is the honest reason I ordered it, and it is not a good reason. I did not read anything. I did not look up a study. I could not have told you one thing about how it worked or why, and I am supposed to be the one who knows these things. I ordered it because I had 6 files with the same picture day in them and nowhere left to show them, and that was the first thing I had seen that seemed to be about that feeling. It was something to do. That is all it was. After 16 years of being the one who is supposed to know what to do. The box came on a Thursday. I gave it to Lily in her room with the door shut, like it was contraband. "Keep this on your backpack. Don't ask me why. Don't make it a thing." She rolled her eyes so hard I heard it. And then she put it on. On the ring clipped to her backpack strap, with our house key and the little rubber fish from the bait shop Greg gave her the first Saturday he took her fishing. I have thought about that a lot since. Those two things on the same ring. Lily walks with both hands on her backpack straps, like she is about to jump out of a plane. She has done it since kindergarten. Greg calls it her parachute. So now her right hand was on a SheSafe every time she walked anywhere. And I did not tell a single person I had bought it. Not Greg. Not my lieutenant. Not one choir mom. Because I could not have explained why, and I was not about to hand my own husband one more reason. And then nothing happened. That is the part I need you to understand, because it is the part that nearly got us. A week went. Then another. Then two more. Every afternoon at about 3:25 my phone buzzed. "home." No period. I looked at her dot sitting on our house and went back to my file. Mr. Dale kept pulling her out of math. She came home lighter. She did her homework without a fight. She said he really gets it. And I almost stopped thinking about it. I would have told you that first week I did not go an hour without thinking about it, and by the fourth week it was just a pink thing on a backpack next to a rubber fish. I would ask about it now and then and she would say yes Mom I have it, in that voice they use, and I would feel stupid for asking. There was a night I sat on the end of my bed and genuinely wondered whether Greg had been right about me for all 15 years we have been married, and I had brought my job home and set it down on my own kid. A Tuesday. Five weeks after Greg's email. The night before, I missed her choir concert. A girl across town had not come home, and I am one of the people they call. Lily had a solo. I got there for the last song. In the car she said, "You care more about other people's kids than me." Then she said, "Mr. Dale says it's not my fault you're like this." Then she went to her room and did not come out. The next day at school, Mr. Dale told her he could drive her home after school. Just until things cool down at home. He said to meet him behind the gas station on the corner, so it would not be weird with the other kids. She did not tell me, because as far as she was concerned it had nothing to do with me. She was not being sneaky about it. She was being 13. She walked out at 3:05 with both hands on her straps, the way she always does, and crossed to the gas station. His car was parked around the back, by the air pump. Next to it was a white van, with the side door already open. Mr. Dale got out of his car and smiled at her. "There she is." A second man got out of the van and stood by the open door. Mr. Dale said, "Your mom's not home till late. You told me." Then he said, "Your dad told me things were hard at home, Lily. You don't have to go back there tonight." They came and stood right in front of her, one on each side. Close enough to touch. Neither one of them touched her. She said she knew before she had finished working out what she was looking at. Her legs went heavy. Her mouth stopped working. My daughter could not get a sound out. Thirteen years of me telling her to scream. She said she opened her mouth and there was nothing in it. She did not decide anything. Her right hand was already on her strap, the way it is every time she walks anywhere, and her hand was already around it. She closed her fist and she pulled. She said the whole back of the gas station went white. The second man said a word I am not going to type and went straight back into the van. Mr. Dale put both hands up in front of his face. "Lily. Lily. Turn that off." She threw it as hard as she could. It skidded across the concrete, around the corner of the building, and stopped against the ice machine by the front door, still screaming and still flashing. A man filling his truck at the first pump turned all the way around with the nozzle still in his hand. A woman coming out with a coffee stopped dead in the doorway. The clerk came out from behind the counter. Two high school boys on bikes stopped in the middle of the lot. And it kept going, right there at the front door where everybody was, and there was nothing either of them could have done about it, because the two halves have to touch each other again and she had the other one closed in her fist. The van went first, out the back onto the service road. Mr. Dale got in his car and went the other way. Nobody walked over to her. She said that plainly and I am putting it in. But every single one of them was looking at where they had gone. A woman at the second pump, with a car seat in the back of her SUV, came to her in the end. She is the one who called it in, and the first thing she said to my daughter was not are you okay. She said, "Is that a SheSafe? My girl's got one of them." That is the sentence Lily remembers most clearly out of the whole day. Not theirs. Hers. I was at my desk. It came over the radio at 3:14. Alarm going off behind the gas station on the service road. Juvenile female. Two adult males, left in two vehicles. I have heard a thousand calls on that radio. I knew this one was her before they said her age. I have driven to a lot of calls in 16 years. I have never driven anywhere the way I drove to that one. Nobody could get it to stop, because Lily's hands were shaking too badly to put the two halves back together. So it was still going when I pulled in, and it was still going when the first patrol car pulled in behind me. She was in the back of that car with a blanket around her, which we do. And she was absolutely fine. And the first thing my daughter said to me was not I'm fine. She has told me she's fine since she could talk. That was the first time she has ever said the other thing to me. They took her statement at my own station, with a woman who does the interviews with kids. They would not let me in the room, because I was her mother and I was a cop, and that is the right rule, and I hated it. Greg got there from the dealership still in his work shirt and stood in the hall. I sat in the break room with Teresa Lane. She has been on 19 years. Forties. Very calm. And I said the thing that had been going around in my head for an hour, which was, she says she could not scream. She keeps saying it. Lily sings alto. You can hear her over 60 kids in a gym. She says she opened her mouth and nothing came out. And Teresa said, "They never can." I said what. "They never can. That's the part nobody tells anybody. Not even us." Then she said, "Do you want the actual answer, or do you want me to be nice about it? I can do either." I said the actual answer. She said there is a name for it. Tonic immobility. It is a reflex. It is what an animal does once its body has decided it cannot get away. It goes completely still. It is not fear and it is not weakness and it is not a decision. The body does it and it does not ask her first. She said there is a study. 298 women, seen at a clinic within a month of what happened to them. 7 out of 10 of them went completely still and could not move. 7 out of 10. "Grown women," she said. "I've watched it happen to a 20 year old college student and a 45 year old mom. I have never once seen a 13 year old do better than that." "And the ones who freeze blame themselves the hardest. That's the cruel part. The one part nobody chooses is the part they can't forgive. Kids especially. They think they did it wrong." Then she told me why it happens. "Once the heart rate goes past a certain point you lose fine motor control. Anything that needs fingertips. A cap. A small button. A phone screen." "Her eyes stop focusing on anything close to her face. Her hearing goes narrow. She can't hold a thought long enough to finish it, so whatever plan you put in her head since she was little, scream, run, find a store, none of it is in there when she goes looking for it." "And the voice goes first. That's the one nobody believes until it happens to them. She opens her mouth and there is nothing in it." I sat in the break room of the building I have worked in for 16 years and I could not speak either. Not because it was frightening. Because in all my years on the job, nobody had ever handed me the word. I have sat across a table from 63 kids I brought home. Every one of them told me some version of the same thing. I just stood there. I couldn't say anything. I wrote it down 63 times. I never once knew it had a name. I have been told to scream since I was a little girl. My mother told me. My training officer told me. I have stood in a school gym in front of 400 kids and told them. Greg told Lily too, every Saturday on that pier. Anybody bothers you, Lil, you holler. Somebody told him that, I would bet you anything, a long time before he ever said it to his own kid. And it is the first thing to go. The first one. Every single thing I have ever taught my daughter to do is a thing her body takes off her in the first two seconds. I said to her, so what am I supposed to give her. And Teresa said, "Everything we do happens after. I'm the after, Rebecca. So are you. I've been the after for 19 years and I have never once gotten anywhere in time." "There's one thing I've watched actually work, and it isn't her fighting anybody. It's other people looking." "He was never afraid of her. Not for a second. Everything he did, for five weeks, was about not being witnessed. He didn't have to follow anybody. Somebody told him when she'd be alone. That's why it's the back of a gas station at 3:10 and not the front of the school with 300 kids standing around." I thought about Greg's email. Then she went through the rest of it fast, like she had said it a hundred times. "Everything you taught her. The code word. Yell 'this is not my dad.' Run into a store. She knew all of it, Rebecca. She couldn't get one word of it out. You can't practice your way out of a reflex. You've taught that class. So have I." "Location sharing. You had her on your screen the whole time. A dot behind a gas station. It tells you where she is. It doesn't make anybody stop." I thought about every afternoon I had looked at that little dot and gone back to my file. "Pepper spray. You carry it, so you know. Find it, get the cap off, aim it at two men who are moving, with the wind going wherever it wants. Three jobs for the exact fingers I just told you stop working. And it does nothing at all until he's close enough to touch her. And her school would suspend her for having it." "And the little keyring alarms, which is what most people buy. Go look at one. The pin hangs off the side of the body on a little loop. So when he grabs for her, he's got the alarm and the off switch in the same hand. Same grab. That isn't a safety device. That's a noise he can switch off." Then she picked up Lily's, because the clerk had picked it up off the ground by the ice machine and it was on the table between us in a plastic bag, and turned it over in her hand. And she said, "This is the only one I've seen do the job." "It isn't a button. She doesn't press it, she pulls it. A button asks a fingertip to find one exact small thing. This asks for a fist." "And she doesn't hold onto it. She pulls it and throws it as far as she can and she goes the other way. Once it's forty feet away at the front door of a gas station, he can pick it up, stomp on it, throw it on the roof, drive off with it, and it does not stop. The two halves have to touch each other again and she's got the other one." "There is no off switch anywhere he can reach." And I said, but she froze. She told me she could not move. How did she do anything at all. And Teresa said, "Because the hand closes. That's the one thing that doesn't go." Gripping is the oldest thing a person has. A baby does it the day it is born, before it can hold its own head up. It sits underneath everything else and it does not need her fingers working, or her eyes focusing, or her voice to come back. Then she said the part I was not ready for. "Two things go off at the same second and they're aimed at two different people. The light is aimed at everybody else. The siren is aimed at her." "A body can't ignore a noise like that coming out of its own hand. It brings her back before it does anything to him. Ask her which happened first. I promise you she was moving again before they were." I asked Lily in the car. She said the noise came and then her legs came back. She said it in that order without me telling her to. And then, right at the end, Teresa said the thing I actually came here to write down. She said, "Whoever put that on her backpack did the only thing anybody can actually do." And I had to sit in my own break room and tell her it was me. That I bought it off the internet, a detective with 16 years on the job, because I had seen it about 40 times. That I could not have explained one single thing about why it works. That I gave it to my daughter in her bedroom with the door shut because I was too embarrassed to say it out loud to my own husband. She did not laugh at me. She said, "Well. You were right." Nobody has said that to me in 15 years. Not my husband. Not my lieutenant. Here's what happened next, and it is the only reason I am posting this instead of keeping it in my house. Teresa pulled Mr. Dale's file that night, the one I had been told to leave alone. Two other districts before ours. At both of them, he started a few weeks after picture day. At both of them, a kid he checked in with was gone before the end of that school year. One of them is still gone. He had been pulling 4 other kids out of class at Lily's school to check in. A boy in seventh grade had a bag packed under his bed. A girl in sixth grade had his cell number saved in her phone under a girl's name. The picture company sent a letter home to every family saying they take privacy very seriously. There is a Facebook group for our neighborhood, and once one mom posted about a white van behind the gas station by the middle school, there were 6 more posts underneath. A man in the bleachers at a seventh grade basketball game who knew a girl's name and her jersey number. A substitute who asked a fourth grader what time her mom got home. And 2 of those mothers had never told anybody at all. Greg did not say anything at the station. He did not say anything at dinner, which nobody ate. That night he came and stood in the kitchen doorway. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Teresa said it was something on her backpack. What was that thing? The light." And I said it was the thing on Lily's backpack. "What thing." And I said the thing on her backpack, Greg. Next to your fish. He did not say anything for a minute. Then he said, "Can you send me the link? I want to get one for every kid in her choir." That is it. That is what I got. No apology. Nothing about the email, or obsessed, or not every man is a monster. I do not think I am going to get one and I have made my peace with that. Just, can you send me the link. I sent it. It was out of stock. I want to tell you about that part, because I did not understand what I had actually bought until that week. It had been sold out for 3 days. Greg sat at the kitchen table refreshing a page like it was concert tickets, and then asked me if I knew how to set an alert, which is a sentence I did not expect to hear from a man who still keeps a flip phone in his truck. It came back in on the Thursday and he bought 31 in the first hour. One for every kid in the eighth grade choir. That Monday his truck was at the front doors of the school at 3:05. He never said a word about it. He has still never said a word about it. Then the mothers started. Choir moms, one at a time, in my messages, never in the group chat. Then the woman from the second pump, for her older girl. Then the clerk at the gas station, who is 22 and closes up alone three nights a week. That was the strangest one. Standing at a gas station counter at six in the morning, spelling a word out for a girl in a name tag. I have sent that link 33 times since that Tuesday. Thirty three. To women who sat at the choir concerts I made it to, and the ones I didn't. To the principal, who said mandated reporter to me. To my lieutenant, who asked for it in the hall without looking at me. Not one of them has said sorry. I do not think that is how it works. But every single one of them told me something back. A choir mom I have known since kindergarten pickup told me about the man who took the school pictures at her elementary school. He came back every year, and every year he asked for her by name. She was 9. She has never said it out loud to anybody, including her husband, and her daughter sings next to Lily. They already know. They have always known. They just did not have anything on them that reached. I want to be honest about the rest of it, because I would hate anybody reading this to think it fixed everything. They have not charged anybody. Mr. Dale resigned before the end of that week. The district called it a personnel matter. He has a clean record and a master's degree, and somewhere in this country there is a school that is going to be very glad to get him. The van has never turned up. Lily is different. She checks behind her. She does not stay after school for anything anymore. She is 13 and she does that now and she did not before, and I cannot give that back to her. I asked for day shifts. I gave up the case I was on. I sit in the pickup line at 3:05 now with everybody else, and nobody at work calls me obsessed about it anymore, and I would rather they did. My lieutenant has still not asked me about the 6 files. They are in the trunk of my car. And Greg and I have not talked about the email. Not once. He is still the parent who is there, and she still sits on his tailgate on a bad day, and there is a thing sitting in the middle of 15 years now that neither of us is going to pick up. So no. It did not fix it. But my daughter was behind a gas station, between a van with its door open and two grown men, and she is in her room right now singing the alto part of something too loud. It did not make me right. I was always right. I just never had one single word to say about it, to my husband, to my lieutenant, to anybody. That is what actually changed. Not the files. The words. I want to say something to whoever is still reading, and especially to the ones who have been called obsessed by the man they married. You are not being told you are wrong. You are being told you are obsessed. There is a difference and it is worse, because there is nothing in it to argue with. You cannot produce evidence against a diagnosis of yourself. I did not have a story. Nothing had happened to us yet. That was the entire problem. I had 6 files with the same picture day in them, and the man I married looked at them and told me not every man is a monster. And it turns out the thing I was afraid of has a name, and it happens to 7 out of 10 women, and nobody had ever told me what it was called. Not in 16 years on the job. I was not obsessed. I was right and I could not speak. She is not going to be big enough. It was never about size. And when it comes she gets about 1 second, and most of that second is her brain catching up. One second, with hands that will not work and a throat that will not make a sound and a body that has already decided to go still without asking her. She cannot think her way out of that. There is nothing in there to think with. The only thing that helps is if it is already on her, and it only asks her for a fist and a throw. And before anything else, tell her about the freeze. Say it out loud in your kitchen tonight. Tell her 7 out of 10 women go completely still, that it is not a choice, and that it will never once be her fault. Because if you do not tell her, somebody else's version gets there first, and that version is that she should have screamed. Get one for her. Get one for yourself. Get one for every kid who smiled for picture day this year. Or don't. Not every man is a monster. You choose. https://www.tryshesafe.com/pages/momreport-v1 P.S. I want to come back to how it actually works, because I went at it afterward the way I go at any piece of evidence. It is 2 pieces. You pull them apart. It is not a button. That sounds like nothing and it is not. A button asks a fingertip to find one specific small thing and press it accurately, and fingertips are the first thing to go. And anything she has to go and get first is worse than that, because going and getting it is a plan, and the plan goes before her hands do. Two halves ask for a fist and a pull, on something already in her hand. She could do it with gloves on. She could do it without looking down at it. She could do it with her hands shaking, and I know that for a fact now, because I saw her hands afterward. The second the halves come apart, it goes off. As loud as an ambulance siren, with a white flashlight strobe at the same time. And once it is out of her hand it does not stop. The two halves have to touch each other again and she has the other one. There is no off switch anywhere he can reach. They take a real pull. They do not come apart on their own, so it will not go off in the bottom of a backpack against a water bottle. Somebody sat down and thought about a girl's hand in the worst 4 seconds of her life, and then thought about her backpack on an ordinary Tuesday. P.P.S. A word on where it goes, because this is the part people get wrong. Her backpack strap. Her keys. A belt loop. The place her hand already is. Not in the bag. Not in the front pocket. Not clipped inside anything, ever. Because a bag comes off her shoulder. That is the first thing that happens. And I need to say something about the other thing I taught her, which was scream. I have taught it for 16 years. To my own kid and to 400 kids at a time in a school gym. Scream and run. Make a scene. Be loud. My daughter sings alto. You can hear her over the whole choir. She could not make one sound behind a gas station with the pumps 40 feet away. I taught my daughter the one thing her body takes away first, and I taught it to her because it is what everybody taught me. So keep the habit of putting something in her hand on the way out the door. Just change what it is. Nothing to pair, no app, no subscription, no account. You charge it twice a year and otherwise you forget it exists. Behind that gas station she never went looking for it. She never made a decision at all. P.P.P.S. On pictures, which is the thing I actually want you to take away. Picture day is the most normal day of the school year. You pick the shirt. You fix her hair. You pay for the package with the wallet sizes. At least 10 people see that picture before you ever get the envelope. The photographer. The editor. The database. The yearbook rep. The yearbook teacher. The front office. School security. Anybody who buys a yearbook. You are not the only person who wants your kid to look good. So after picture day, look at who is new in her building. A coach. A sub. A bus driver. A counselor. Look at who is asking her how things are at home. Most of them are fine. Most of them really are. You do not get to pick which ones are not. You are allowed to ask who is new. That is not being obsessed. That is knowing who has a picture of your kid. P.P.P.P.S. I am going to say this one plainly, because it is the only part of this I actually feel strongly about. I have never met a mother who did this before something happened. They come after. Almost every single time, they come after. I have stood in their living rooms. I used to think that was sad. Now I think it is just how people are built, and I did the same thing myself, which is the only reason I am allowed to say it. I had 6 files with the same picture day in them, and I still did not order one until I had seen it about 40 times. There is no date circled on a calendar telling you today is the day. That is the whole nature of it. Every woman I have told this to has said the same six words back to me. I should get one of those. Then a week goes by. Then a month. Right now it comes with 3 free gifts, worth $70, and they are running their early Black Friday deal. Order it tonight while you are still thinking about it, or don't. But be honest with yourself about which one of those you are doing. P.P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, in case you skimmed. 365 days. Any reason at all. You do not have to have used it. You do not have to have a story. You do not have to prove one single thing to anybody, including your husband. Including your lieutenant. If it has been on her backpack for 8 months and you decide you do not want it, they send the money back. I read that and assumed there was a catch, because I assume there is always a catch. It is my job to assume that. There isn't one. P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Greg still has not said sorry. He has said, in the last two months: that he is so glad Lily is okay, that he told every guy at the dealership, that he keeps his clipped to the visor of his truck, and that he thinks the light on it is very good. He is not going to say the other thing, and he is my daughter's dad, and I am not going to make him. But there are two things on my daughter's backpack now. A little rubber fish from the man who sent her to talk to that counselor about me. And a thing that got her away from that counselor's car without one word. They sit next to each other on the same ring, and my daughter loves them both, and I have decided that I can live with being the woman who bought the second one. https://www.tryshesafe.com/pages/momreport-v1