Lost child

Kids scare the living daylight out of adults, and they have no clue when they do it.

Happened to me recently.

“Can you come and watch the kids while we go to a conference?” my son asked.

Any excuse with the grandkids works for me. We fed the first-grade granddaughter and her toddler and preschool-aged brothers. We read bed time stories and tucked them into bed.

I read a bit, turned off the lights and slept until the toddler needed a reassuring pat on his back. I pulled the blankets up over the boys and stepped in my granddaughter’s room to check her blankets.

The bed was empty.

Empty — and no child laid on the floor beside the bed.

I stepped across the hall to the bathroom. No sleepy-eyed child in there.

I quietly made my way to the kitchen. No little girl there. No child in the dining room, the living room or the playroom. My heart raced as I moved around the house searching for her.

My son and his wife would be back in less than an hour. What would I tell them? The doors were locked, the street quiet and the bed empty.

Taking a deep breath I went back to her room in disbelief and double checked.

No child in the closet. A blanket on the floor drew me to my knees. I looked deep under the day bed shoved against the wall where I discovered her sleeping soundly.

Whew!

Rather than wrestle her out from underneath the springs, I left her sleeping. Her parents could deal with moving her into the bed when they came home.

They returned within the hour. “Sophie is sleeping way under her bed,” I whispered.

“Oh, she does that,” her mother shrugged, oblivious to my shock and fear that I had lost a child in the middle of the night in a locked house.

It isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to me.

On a hot summer day we lost my then five-year-old son. Being in the middle of yet another massive remodeling project we kept the big boys busy helping us while the little boys played in the yard.

Lunch time found us all gathered around the table, hot, sweaty and hungry from a morning’s activity — except we could not find the 5-year-old to eat with us.

We went back outside and looked up and down the street of our family friendly neighborhood. No left-behind trikes or toys lay abandoned on the sidewalk. No kid played cowboys and Indians in the garden’s cornstalks or in the playroom above the tool shed. No child quietly played in the yard or neighborhood ignoring our calls to lunch.

Back into the house we went. Upstairs to the boys’s hot rooms. Without air conditioning, the hot upstairs rarely saw kids playing there in the summer and for sure played there that day.

Hearts in our throats we went back downstairs. I went into our bedroom to gather my thoughts and think of somewhere else to look. I started to turn the lounge-rocking chair around to sit down to think and discovered little boy blue fast asleep, draped over the chair to the floor in total exhaustion.

“Here he is,” I called to my husband.

“Whew!” he said. “I could not believe anyone would take him. It would be really dumb to take him. We do not have any money,” he expressed his fears out loud.

That worry comes anytime a parent or grandparent cannot find a child.

A family member posted a lengthy blog about her heart-stopping experience.

She went for a jog with her husband, a baby in a stroller and their 12 year-old holding the leash of their golden retriever. They chose a new path which lead to a pond. There her son stopped to tie his shoes. She pushed the stroller into the grass beside a wooden bridge calling over her shoulder, “You might want to take the bridge.”

Back on the path on the other side of bridge, she waited for her son.

He didn’t appear.

She retraced her steps. No son appeared or answered when she called. She did hear a man’s gruff, urgent voice deep in the woods.

“Are you OK?” she screamed.

No answer.

She called the police.

“Try to stay calm, ma’am. Tell us what he is wearing.”

“He is with our golden retriever and wearing a striped shirt.”

Police cars began arriving. One officer reported having seen a kid running with a golden retriever, but the boy did not have on a striped shirt.

“I’ll go back and ask his name.”

By then, in their small community, everyone knew a child was missing — including the boy’s teacher. He saw the missing boy and stopped to say, “Your parents are looking for you.”

The policeman drove up and asked the child his name.

The kid had simply misunderstood his mom’s comment about the bridge and turned a different direction.

Reunited with her son, Momma could finally take a deep breath and calm down, but she will always remember the fright.

That’s life in the family zone. The adults worry, the kids don’t. And that’s how it should be. Have a safe and happy summer.

Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times. Email her at joanh@everybody.org.


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