Missing

Or: through the looking glass of parenting.

You know when you’re in the middle of something, and you suddenly realize it’s been a while since you heard your children? All of a sudden the house is too quiet, and it’s been much too long since you heard so much as the sticky shuffle of grippy socks, let alone the screech of a Hot Wheels car on the hardwood floor in the hallway? 

That’s how this started. 

One second I was creating a pivot table and glancing back and forth between the spreadsheet on one side of my monitor and the Quickbooks report on the other, and the next I was hyper-aware of how quiet it was. How quiet it had been. 

I hollered for my 15-month-old, Reid. Nothing. 

I called for my five-year-old, Maggie. No response. 

I screamed for my seven-year-old, Royce. Silence. 

I headed to the back of the house. But my kids, who make noise from the second they roll out of bed to 40-60 minutes after we tuck them in for the night, were totally and completely quiet. 

After a full 10 minutes of searching—flinging open every cupboard, looking under every bed, and checking the washer and dryer—I found Maggie outside, swinging on the swingset. I found Royce shooting nerf guns in the shop. But Reid was still nowhere to be found. Now I was in a full-blown, hysterical panic, with a five-year-old big-sister-second-mother and an anxiety-prone seven-year-old hot on my heels. 

Finally (finally!), I found him in the kids’ bathroom. I just…couldn’t get to him. 

Without getting too into the weeds, what you need to know about the (poorly designed) setup of the kids bathroom in our house is that there are a set of drawers that, when pulled out, prevent the door to the bathroom from opening. 

When I finally found Reid that morning—after 15 minutes of searching—I discovered that he had shut the bathroom door, pulled out those particular drawers, and effectively locked himself in the bathroom. To make a long story short, after 40 minutes and a panicked phone call to my dad, I was able to slam the door hard enough against the drawers to bend the tracks, at which point I was able to snake my arm through the crack and rip the (now broken) drawer out of the cabinet completely. Finally, a full 60 minutes after I sat at my desk crunching numbers in peace, I clutched Reid to my chest, collapsed against the wall in the hallway, and sobbed. 

I was thinking about the bathroom door incident the other morning, when a memory surfaced of a high school boys varsity basketball game that took place sometime during the winter of my 7th grade year. I have a notoriously bad memory that seems to be getting worse, so the details of this memory are admittedly hazy. But the jist of it is this: A popular girl invited me to come with her and her family to watch her older brother play basketball in a town more than an hour north of ours, my parents were at the jobsite in a town an hour south of ours, I had no way to contact them (this was before cell phones), and I left a note for my parents and went to the basketball game anyway. 

A note. 

I admittedly don’t remember my parents reaction to this chain of events, but I can’t imagine it was positive. 

It never even occurred to me to consider how my parents would feel, coming home after a long day of manual labor and managing subcontractors, to find their only daughter not at home, where they thought she would be. But now, more than 20 years later, that’s all I can think about. 

How long did it take them to find my note? Did they tear apart the house searching for me? Did they yell my name up the stairs? Did their hearts race and their palms sweat as they realized I wasn’t, in fact, home? 

How did they feel when they figured out where I was and…couldn’t get to me?

I’m certain that 7th grade me would have told you that going to a basketball game 60 miles away without telling my parents was no big deal. 7th grade me (and 8th-12th grade me, TBH) thought a lot of things were NBD, and was endlessly frustrated by her parents’ rules and concerns. 

20 years later, I wonder if perhaps I owe my parents an apology.