"A Special Glove"

Yesterday proved to be a typical North Carolina day with crazy weather patterns.  There were strong thunderstorms in the early morning, clear, sunny skies in the afternoon, and downpours in the evening.  Thankfully, we caught a few hours of 70° sunshine and headed to one of our many local area parks.  Jackson surpsingly wanted to sit in the stroller, which meant I could walk the full mile trail around the lake.

I carry a sleeve of saltine crackers or a bag of stale bread in the van at all times.  You never know when the opportunity will arise to feed ducks.  Since feeding ducks is one of Jackson's favorite pastimes, we spent a respectable amount of time tossing crushed up crackers onto the ground and lake.  A few of the ducks started to line up before we even got the crackers out, waiting to be fed.

After walking around the loop, we stopped at the playground.  We go to this particular park for the walking path, fountain, and hungry ducks-- not for the playground.  I've always thought the playground was poorly designed because it's very closed off with lots of hideaways, making it impossible to supervise your child by merely standing in one spot.  Jackson climbed and ran around, but the slides had enormous puddles at the bottom from the morning storm. 

Thank God I happened to be directly in front of Jackson when he kneeled down and exclaimed, "Look, Mommy! It's a special glove."  Just as he started to pick up the glove, I immediately realized what it was and screamed, "NOOO!  DON'T TOUCH THAT!"  As I got closer, I confirmed that the "special glove" was indeed a used condom.  A very well used condom.  [insert expletives here]



Take a closer look

My strong reaction opened the floodgates to every question possible.  "Why, Mommy?  What is that?  It okay. I not touch it.  You throw it away? Why it on the ground?"  As I was getting my hand sanitizer out, another boy much smaller than Jackson was crawling under the space and nearly slid on the condom.  I quickly got him up, asked him where his Mommy or Daddy was, and took the child to them.  When I alerted them that there was a used condom on the playground, the mother said, "Oh, Christ!"  We all looked at one another and the dad said, "I'll take one for the team".  He had a few slices of bread left in his bag that he dumped out.  He turned the bag inside out and used it as a glove to pick up the condom and dispose of it.  There was an unspoken solidarity between us parents, then we burst out in nervous laughter and immediately left the park to go bleach our children.