The Day My Van Locked Me Out

I was eight months pregnant, and it was the Friday before Easter.

I woke up that morning excited to go into school without any students present. I worked with some especially fun women—they understood the benefits of learning through play and applied that idea to every area of their lives. We did the work we needed to do: tidying up the classroom and getting crafts ready for the next week. We also did work we didn’t need to do: catch up on the exciting events we’d missed in each other’s lives during the last week and sip coffee from my French press. We even got to wear jeans.

That morning, I donned my most stretchy pair of maternity jeans and a cozy shirt, ate a quick bowl of oatmeal, and put on my army green Spring jacket. I climbed into the van and pushed play on my favorite Rosemary Clooney album. Suddenly, I realized I’d forgotten something—I don’t even remember what it was. I went into the house and came back to discover that I had left my van running with the keys in the ignition and my cell phone on the seat, and somehow  (definitely not user error) my van had been locked. I had no phone—no way to call my husband—and no way to get back into my house.

My neighbor across the cul-de-sac was a principal at a local high school. I thought: surely she’s up and getting ready to go into school today, too. Nope. Her house looked silent and foreboding. I tried my neighbor one house down. Nothing. I walked down the street until I came to the next block. I noticed an open garage door a few houses down and hesitantly rang the doorbell. A woman with white hair, pinned back in a clip, answered the door. I introduced myself as her new neighbor at the end of the cul-de-sac. She immediately noticed how pregnant I was and invited me in for a glass of orange juice. Her husband walked into the room a few minutes later, just returned from his night shift at a factory. They found their phone book, and I found the number to the nursing home my husband worked at. What a morning.

To this day, I never shut the van door with the keys in the ignition.