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Originally posted elsewhere on October 22, 2010.
Have you ever lost your child? I don’t need to specify an amount of time. 10 seconds of not knowing where your child is? Panic inducing. An absolute nightmare.
I lost TJ for about 20 seconds at the costume store a few weeks ago. He wanted to look at the Halloween decoration display with the creepy zombie babies (really?) while I was looking at the women’s costumes about 20 feet away. I told him to stay put by the creepy babies, and I would not move from the “mommy costume” section. This was the first time I’d let him be in a public place more than five feet away from me.
Wouldn’t you know it? When I finished looking where I was, TJ was not by the creepy babies. I’d had my eye on the exit door, so I knew he hadn’t gone out or been taken out, but my heart leapt in my throat.
“TJ?” I called. “TJ!”
Panic was rising quickly. He wasn’t anywhere in sight. This was a big store, but it had lots of wide open space in the middle, which is where I’d told him to be. I called his name a few more times as I headed toward the other side of the store, looking up and down every aisle.
Finally, I saw him. He was calling for me, too. “Mommy!”
We may have run up and hugged each other. It’s kind of a blur. I told him I was so worried when I couldn’t find him because he’d promised to stay by the creepy babies, and he replied that he had been worried when he couldn’t find me… near the Buzz Lightyear cutout in the kids section. Kids just get things in their heads, and it clouds what we’ve actually told them. In his mind, he wanted to check out Buzz Lightyear again, so that’s where I should have been.
I was so scared…I don’t know that I’ll let him more than five feet away from me again for a while. At what age did you start letting your kids wander a bit in stores?
That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.
We never had a problem losing NHL. Since he had trouble walking on his own and needed to hold our hand to walk, he was never too far from us. JSL, on the other hand, was Mr. Independent. He once decided to walk off when I was distracted for a second. A second was all it took. I even saw where he went in my peripheral vision. But when I went to look for him, he was gone.
Then, I noticed the coat rack laughing. He had decided to play Hide and Seek and, luckily, was a bad hider. Later, in that same store, he took off again while I put on NHL’s coat. He got quite far away (I was following him but not running to catch up) without looking to see if mom/dad were anywhere nearby.
After that, we bought a monkey backpack with a long tail “leash.” This way, he could be Mr. Independent and we could still know just where he was. (I used to look down on child leashes until that incident. Suddenly, they made perfect sense.)
My kids are teens. If I let them go look at something I am still a bit nervous till they come back to find me. It never gets any less anxiety producing to let your kids go off on their own.
Oh man….There have been several times that my son has run off and I haven’t been able to find him. It was never for more than about 5 minutes, and never in a situation when I truly could have lost him (except for one time that we were outside at some event – scared the ever loving bejesus out of me), but it was enough.
My kid has always been the run-off-without-mom type; he’s always been the kind who would just go running down the aisle at the grocery store and wouldn’t care if he was on his own. He’s vastly better now (at age 7), but those times probably took 5 years off my life. (We did the backpack-leash thing too, and that definitely helped.)
I have had a scare like that with my older son when he was 4. He lost me and he went to the service desk and told them he was lost. I was in panic mode when I heard my name being called over the intercom.
My younger son climbed under a display table and hid once when we were all three shopping. He was two. He would not answer us. They locked down the store and had the police on the way when we heard a giggle and he climbed out. He scared me again once when he was 10. He got mad and ran back into the wooded section of our property. I went to look for him later, and he was gone. Figured he had just walked down to the neighbor’s house, but he wasn’t there. Was walking across the street to the other neighbor’s house when I saw a scuzzy guy with no shirt and a big knife walk by. I’d never seen him before, and this was out in the country where people don’t just walk around like that and everybody knows everybody. Then I saw his backpack on the side of the road slit open on the bottom. I went BERSERK! Went to the other neighbor’s house screaming and crying, thinking he had been kidnapped. We called the sheriff, and she walked me back to my house. By now I’m hysterical! Just as the sheriff pulled up, he came walking out of the house. He had hidden in the computer room and fallen asleep. The sheriff had a stern talk with him, right after he called off the other 6 patrolmen who were headed out there to look for him. The next week, that same guy I saw, who turned out to be a cousin of a friend, killed two people looking for drug money right down the road and injured another one. How lucky was I that he did not get my son? That was the most frightened I have ever been in my life.