More Separation Anxiety

(The photo above is the scene of the crime mentioned below in this entry.)


How long it took Abby to snap after she was left alone and start tearing things up is something we often wondered. One day we found out the answer to that question; it didn’t take long at all until Abby would pitch a fit.

My mom was going somewhere one day, barely made it a block down the street when she realized that she forgot something and had to turn around and go back to the house. From the time she left until the time she returned, no more than five minutes had elapsed. As my mom passed through the den, she saw a mangled pair of reading glasses. Abby had already pitched a baby-girl fit hardly a moment after my mom had left the house. (I want to note that my mom bought reading glasses from the drug store and did not use prescription glasses from an optometrist.)

Not all of Abby’s fits were destructive. Something else she loved to do when left alone was either to get something from my mom’s bathroom or out of my bedroom. The items brought from these parts of the house were not destroyed or even damaged. Abby would simply pick up the item and bring it to the living room. I can only speculate why she did it. If she were mad, she would have destroyed the items like she did my mom’s reading glasses or my electronic organizer, but she didn’t destroy them so she wasn’t mad. I guess having these items in the living room reminded her of us while we were away and kept her company while she was alone.

One particular incident that I recall with fondness and amusement involved Abby dragging every single object in my mom’s shower into the living room (The shower is a walk-in lined with tile. There is also a bathtub, but it is separate from the shower. My mom only used the shower and never the bathtub.). I was checking her shower the other day and there must have been at least a half a dozen objects in there, probably more. This included items such as lotions, soap, razor, shampoo and conditioners. The whole shower was cleared out and taken to the living room. All of these items had to be taken individually, so Abby must have taken over a half a dozen trips back and forth form the back of the house to the living room. That is about a 200 ft round trip which added up means she walked more than three lengths of a football field to accomplish this. Abby had purpose, determination and deliberation on her mission to bring out all of these objects to the living room.

What made it funnier is how she arranged the items on the floor. She didn’t simply place them randomly around the room. Abby put them in the shape of a semi-circle. I wished we had taken a picture of this, but sadly we didn’t. I can imagine Abby sitting in the middle of this semi-circle staring at her work. No way was I going to get mad at her for that! When she did cute things like that, it made me want to squeeze the shit out of her.