| I Replace My Neighbors Son | OK, so ten years might have passed already, but I am seriously still not over what happened to me when I was 6 years old. One moment I was just a kid playing in my backyard, the next my life was completely flipped upside down and to this day I still have nightmares about it! I’m Cody by the way, and this is my crazy story… My family and I live in a really small town, so when something happens to someone, everyone knows about it! When I was just a little kid my best friend was the boy who lived next door. We did everything together! Well, at least we did until he died. I was only 5 at the time so I didn’t really understand what had happened. I just knew I wouldn’t be playing with him ever again. He’d drowned in the lake in the park, and everyone was devastated about it. I remember that after that happened, my parents wouldn’t let me go back to that park. Even today, I still can’t really go there without getting upset. The walls of our house were really thin, so we could hear his parents crying all night long. This went on for months! My mom tried to help them by taking them meals and stuff, but they never answered the door. One day I was playing with my toy cars at the bottom of our backyard. My mom was inside vacuuming, and my dad was out at work. I noticed our neighbor peeking at me through the curtains in her house, but when I looked again, she was gone. Suddenly the vacuum was turned off and I heard my mom’s voice. Someone was at the door. And then I heard something horrible… My mom was screaming, “He’s my baby. What are you talking about? can’t just take him like this!” And then two men in official uniforms came into the backyard and took me by the hand and escorted me through the house, out the front door and into a van. The whole time my mom was screaming, and I just started crying. I had no idea what was going on!! They wouldn’t let me mom come with me, and I remember thinking I was being kidnapped… And I pretty much was! They took me to a center with some other kids, but instead of letting me play with them, they made me go to this little white room with no windows and then one of the men who’d brought me there, sat down opposite me and started asking me questions. He asked me if I was scared of my mom and dad, and if they ever hurt me. I just sat there crying, which probably made it worse, because then they really got concerned. Eventually they told me that I’d be staying in the center for the night, but that a nice lady from my neighborhood had offered to foster me whilst social services investigated the issue further. That night I didn’t sleep at all. And the next day the ‘nice lady’ appeared and I couldn’t believe it!! It was our neighbor…the mom of my friend who’d died. The first thing she said to me was, “Don’t worry Cody, your mom and dad won’t hurt you anymore!” I refused to leave with her and I’m so glad I made such a scene, because about five minutes later the police turned up with my parents, and turns out our neighbor had gone crazy after losing her son, and couldn’t bear to see my mom and me together, so she’d called the police and told them she heard my mom beating me. She was crazy to think that it would all work out! Last I heard she ended up in a psychiatric unit and there was even some talk that she was responsible for her son drowning… I’m just glad my parents turned up when they did! I hate to think what could have happened to me if I’d been left alone with her… | |
