The neighbours shamed my child on Facebook over sidewalk chalk...

I hate it here

So, this happened:

That’s the short version, obviously.

The slightly longer version is that Max and his friend were playing with sidewalk chalk — as you do when you’re five and six — and they decided to try writing the alphabet on a handy fence. I’m absolutely sure they didn’t do it maliciously: it just didn’t occur to them that this was someone else’s property and that they probably shouldn’t do that… right up until the moment one of the neighbours came issuing out of the house opposite and started threatening to call the police on them, while taking photos as ‘evidence’.

They know not to chalk on fences now, needless to say.

Well, Neighbour #1 sent a photo to Neighbour #2 — the owner of the fence in question — and Neighbour #2 freaked the hell out and posted it on the street’s Facebook group to ‘shame’ the parents — us — into doing something about it, and to make a long story short, I need to move now, because, guys, I hate it here.

I mean, seriously.

Photo by Miki Fath on Unsplash

As I said in a follow-up to my Thread on the subject, I’m not defending the chalking-on-someone-else’s-fence. I’ll hold my hands up here and admit that I don’t think it’s the WORST thing a kid could do — like, I wouldn’t personally consider it a police matter, but that’s just me — but we obviously spoke to Max about respecting other people’s property, and made him wash it off (it took all of 30 seconds, because he’d only got to ‘G’ I think…), so we’re not total deadbeat parents, no matter what the good citizens of our street seem to think of us.

But… they took photos of children, and posted them on the internet to shame them. Is it just me, or is that not exactly okay either?

I don’t think that’s okay.

Anyway. The person who posted the photo took it down when I asked her to, and Terry’s somehow managed to convince me that I need to just let it drop now, and not spend the rest of my life thinking about all the things I could’ve said but didn’t on the Facebook post shaming my 6-year-old. But this is the same Terry who took delivery of a brand new box of sidewalk chalk yesterday, so I can’t help but feel like the battle lines have been drawn (in chalk, needless to say…), and we will now be fighting a bizarre suburban war from now until some distant point in the future when we won’t even remember what actually happened, just that we all hold an ancient grudge that we will carry now for generations.

In the meantime, every morning I walk Max to school in the morning and then I put my earbuds in and walk back through the misty, rain-soaked streets of the village, listening to I Hate It Here by Taylor Swift on repeat and wondering how it can possibly be the case that the person who apparently, like, understaaaands me the most right now is a 34-year-old billionaire, who has never even been to Direbury.¹

Did Taylor also once live on a street where people complain about children walking past their houses and setting off the ring doorbells, though? (Not trespassing, you understand, or deliberately triggering the doorbells, just… walking by. On the footpath. On their way somewhere.) Because how else would she have managed to write a song that’s totally about me? How?

The good news in all of this, however, is that Threads really came through for me, huh? Honestly, posting that update and getting so many responses to it (and most of them siding with me, too!) felt a bit like going back in time to the golden era of Twitter, when you didn’t have to pay for reach, and people were generally quite sensible, and not just looking for an argument all the time. It went back to normal the next day, obviously, when the next Thread I posted got a grand total of 7 ‘hearts’, but still: it was good while it lasted…

Until next week,

1. Not its actual name