Yesterday, Husband and I took Baby O to a local park that has an excellent playground for littlies. The place was packed as the sun had decided to reappear after hiding for the whole first week in May.

We’d been there about half an hour when I noticed that it had suddenly grown quieter, that people were just standing and looking at something going on. I looked over to one corner of the playground and saw a middle-aged man with his arms around a girl of maybe three years old. The girl was crying loudly and there was a women trying to get the little girl out of his arms. She then called out in Swedish: “Let go of my daughter!”

My immediate reaction was that he was trying to kidnap her little girl and my second thought was that he was a father trying to kidnap his daughter away from his estranged wife. I tried to get Husband’s attention to go and do something about it, go over and calm them down, something. While I was trying to tell him what was going on, another of the fathers in the park walked over. I couldn’t hear what was being said but he spoke very calmly to both of them and I saw the women eventually let go of her hold on the child. One of the other mothers in the playground then walked over to the father and girl and handed him a child’s sunhat. I suddenly realised that I had completely misjudged the situation: in fact, it was a father trying to protect his daughter from this woman.

He gathered together all his and her things at great speed, pulled out his mobile and while trying to get his daughter strapped into the stroller, I heard him say on the mobile that he was in the park and that his wife had appeared. From the way he was talking, I think he must have called someone official – perhaps the social services or the police. As soon as his daughter was in the stroller, he ran out of the park with her.

Meanwhile, the woman was trying to talk to some of the other mothers in the park and then she pulled out a mobile phone, made a phone call and then left.

I feel bad that I misjudged the situation and immediately assumed that the man was the one to blame, and it upsets me that a relationship ends in a situation like this, upsetting a child so much.

And the more I think about it, the stranger it becomes. Typically, the social services will endeavour to keep a child with its mother unless the mother does not want custody or is unfit to look after them, which is what I can imagine to be the case here, given that she seemed to want her daughter back if she was willing to take her in the middle of a children’s playground. Also, it makes me wonder if the father regularly took the daughter there and that the mother knew or guessed they’d be there, or had she been following them? And finally, the mother wasn’t Swedish but the father appeared to be. Someone once told me about a rule in Sweden, the gist of which means that if a Swede and a non-Swede (and I think non-EU) have a child and live in Sweden and then separate or divorce, the child needs to remain in the country and cannot be taken outside Sweden by the non-Swedish parent for more than a certain number of days. Whatever the exact terms of the rule, it means there are quite a few bitter single parents only living here in Sweden because they have had a child with a Swede and are now stuck here until their child turns 18.

The whole encounter in the park took perhaps four or five minutes but it left both Husband and I quite shaken and we noticed that most of the other parents too were far more watchful with their children afterwards.