Zip Tie Mom

By Dani Eberbach

This essay received an honorable mention in our Circle of Trust writing contest—exclusively open to Exhale members. Learn more here.

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I held my son’s hand, probably a little tighter than I needed to, and pulled him along with me through the parking lot into the grocery store. This stop was not planned, but neither were the two stops we’d already made to re-buckle the car seat harness after my son unbuckled himself—again. I was frustrated, desperate, and ready to resort to drastic measures to keep him secure in his car seat.

“We’re going to get zip ties?” my three-year-old asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“To put on me?”

“To put on your car seat buckle,” I replied. I spoke loudly enough that any other shoppers who overheard my son’s question would also hear the context to go with it. If anyone had been paying attention to us, they would have seen a stressed and disgruntled mother purchasing a single package of zip ties at the Meijer self-checkout. That could have raised some eyebrows. “I’m going to put zip ties on your seat belt to stop you from unbuckling it,” I continued. “I need you to be safe in the car.”

The first time my son unbuckled himself while the car was in motion, it wasn’t a deliberate act of defiance. He had fiddled with the clips out of pure curiosity and finally figured out how to release them. But after that, he knew he could do it, and soon he realized that while I was driving the car, there was nothing I could do to stop him.

I explained the dangers of riding in a car without a proper seat belt. My brother-in-law, a state trooper, lectured him about seat belt laws. We tried consequences. (“Leave your seat belt alone, or you’ll have a time out when we get home.”) We tried bribery. (“If you stay buckled all the way to Grandma’s house, you get a Reese’s Cup!”) Apparently, none of that compared with the thrill of forcing me to stop the car in the nearest parking lot to buckle him back in—sometimes multiple times in one trip. He liked to see where I would stop. He liked the attention. He liked being in control.

I was terrified of what might happen if we were in an accident.