Perfect parents will explain how they could NEVER lose their kid in a crowd. Perfect parents would never let their children drown in a supervised pool. Perfect parents would never forget their kids in the car. I used to be a perfect parent, but then I actually had kids. And now I know how it can happen to the best of us.
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Five years ago, August 14, 2014, my kids were 7 and 8 and we went to the State Fair as we had for years before. We had a system, we knew where to go, we had our plans laid out for what to eat and what to see. When they were little little, we had strollers to keep them in check. My best idea ever had been three years earlier when I tied balloons to their wrists and gave them some freedom, but could spot the bobbing red helium within 5 feet of me at all times. But this was the summer where they were too cool to hold hands with me for hours at a time, but too young to have a phone or a map or anything I could trust them with today.
As we wandered past the kidway, I was in total control, happy with how the day had gone, and ready to leave in the mid-afternoon. I turned to my left to ask Colton if he still had ride tickets he wanted to use and he said no. Then I looked to my right to ask his brother the same, but he wasn't there. He had been just a minute ago, right? I pointed to the visitor center and asked if anyone had to go to the bathroom and no one did. Did they both say no? Or just say nothing and I assumed? When did I really see him last? Immediately, I looked up from where he should be standing and as far back as I could in the dense crowd to see if I could spot him. Nothing.
I'm going to try to explain my mindset as clearly as I can remember, but I know it was blurry, fast, and that I felt like I wasn't doing anything right.
I looked up and couldn't see him. I asked Colton where he was and he shrugged, with 0% of the urgency that I had already felt. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was embarrassment and trying to minimize the scene I might cause or indicate to complete strangers that I had lost my kid. I didn't yell his name, I didn't ask for help. I just grabbed Colton's hand and started frantically scanning the crowd and retracing my steps back to see if he had just stopped walking and hung back a bit. My second thought was that he was abducted, an easy target for kidnapping and headlines started flashing about the missing child and his negligent mother. I truly don't know how much time passed, but it was too long before I started yelling. I stood on a bench at the crossroads just a bit back and yelled his name. People started to look at me like I was crazy, or more likely, that I was a trash parent who couldn't keep track of half my kids. I yelled over and over, no one stopped to see if they could help search or ask any descriptions of this missing kid, it was like I was contagious and they didn't want to catch being a bad mom, too. It wasn't until I got off the bench and started walking down a different road that I spotted a cop. I was screaming and crying by this point and begged him to help me. He calmed me down, got on the radio with a description, I had pulled up the photo I took of him in a red shirt and cast taken just that morning. Within seconds, he confirmed that they had found my baby who was taken to the safe space on the other side of the fair. Colton and I hopped on a golf cart and I was reunited with my formerly missing child.
It turned out, when I asked through tears and bear hugs, where he went, he said he saw a water mister at the corner and wanted to go stand under it for a minute. He said he told me he was going, maybe I didn't hear. It was a complete misunderstanding where no one was "wrong" but I learned to do better.
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I work really hard not to judge other parents now. The instinct is still there, the objective perspective and hindsight for how you could do better is always present, but to take a breath and remember that we're trying our best and learning as we go, I have so much more grace and understanding, not just for parents of lost kids, but parents of depressed kids, problem kids, lazy kids, disobedient kids, failing kids, all the kids I thought I'd never have. I ended up with a few of those in my two.
I wouldn't wish the terror of a lost kid on anyone, but I wish we all had some more understanding and love to give, and a lot less judgement, or at least not so much so that my first thought when I lost my kid was "what will the other moms think of me?"
--
Five years ago, August 14, 2014, my kids were 7 and 8 and we went to the State Fair as we had for years before. We had a system, we knew where to go, we had our plans laid out for what to eat and what to see. When they were little little, we had strollers to keep them in check. My best idea ever had been three years earlier when I tied balloons to their wrists and gave them some freedom, but could spot the bobbing red helium within 5 feet of me at all times. But this was the summer where they were too cool to hold hands with me for hours at a time, but too young to have a phone or a map or anything I could trust them with today.
As we wandered past the kidway, I was in total control, happy with how the day had gone, and ready to leave in the mid-afternoon. I turned to my left to ask Colton if he still had ride tickets he wanted to use and he said no. Then I looked to my right to ask his brother the same, but he wasn't there. He had been just a minute ago, right? I pointed to the visitor center and asked if anyone had to go to the bathroom and no one did. Did they both say no? Or just say nothing and I assumed? When did I really see him last? Immediately, I looked up from where he should be standing and as far back as I could in the dense crowd to see if I could spot him. Nothing.
I'm going to try to explain my mindset as clearly as I can remember, but I know it was blurry, fast, and that I felt like I wasn't doing anything right.I looked up and couldn't see him. I asked Colton where he was and he shrugged, with 0% of the urgency that I had already felt. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was embarrassment and trying to minimize the scene I might cause or indicate to complete strangers that I had lost my kid. I didn't yell his name, I didn't ask for help. I just grabbed Colton's hand and started frantically scanning the crowd and retracing my steps back to see if he had just stopped walking and hung back a bit. My second thought was that he was abducted, an easy target for kidnapping and headlines started flashing about the missing child and his negligent mother. I truly don't know how much time passed, but it was too long before I started yelling. I stood on a bench at the crossroads just a bit back and yelled his name. People started to look at me like I was crazy, or more likely, that I was a trash parent who couldn't keep track of half my kids. I yelled over and over, no one stopped to see if they could help search or ask any descriptions of this missing kid, it was like I was contagious and they didn't want to catch being a bad mom, too. It wasn't until I got off the bench and started walking down a different road that I spotted a cop. I was screaming and crying by this point and begged him to help me. He calmed me down, got on the radio with a description, I had pulled up the photo I took of him in a red shirt and cast taken just that morning. Within seconds, he confirmed that they had found my baby who was taken to the safe space on the other side of the fair. Colton and I hopped on a golf cart and I was reunited with my formerly missing child.
It turned out, when I asked through tears and bear hugs, where he went, he said he saw a water mister at the corner and wanted to go stand under it for a minute. He said he told me he was going, maybe I didn't hear. It was a complete misunderstanding where no one was "wrong" but I learned to do better.
--
I work really hard not to judge other parents now. The instinct is still there, the objective perspective and hindsight for how you could do better is always present, but to take a breath and remember that we're trying our best and learning as we go, I have so much more grace and understanding, not just for parents of lost kids, but parents of depressed kids, problem kids, lazy kids, disobedient kids, failing kids, all the kids I thought I'd never have. I ended up with a few of those in my two.
I wouldn't wish the terror of a lost kid on anyone, but I wish we all had some more understanding and love to give, and a lot less judgement, or at least not so much so that my first thought when I lost my kid was "what will the other moms think of me?"
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