The Time I Lost My Child, But Not Forever

My mom likes to tell the story about the time when she and I were in the local drugstore in Queens, NY, where we lived when I was a young boy.  She purchased her items, walked a few blocks home, and greeted my father.

“Where’s Tom?” he said.

Ah, yes!  My mother had left me in the drugstore, all by myself.  I was five years old.

She sprinted back to the store and there I was in the toy aisle, oblivious to the fact that I had been abandoned, albeit accidently and temporarily.

Many year’s later, I had a similar experience…

My daughter was the world’s worst sleeper.  For the first few years of her life, it was nearly impossible to get her to go to sleep and truly impossible to keep her asleep.  When she would wake up, it was as though someone were torturing her.  She would cry and scream and thrash about.  It was terrible.  (And, we later learned, due to severe acid reflux.)

One evening, my now-ex-wife went out to dinner with some of her girlfriends.   Sad as it is to admit, I was terrified.  Terrified to be alone with my own baby daughter.  How on Earth would I get her to go to sleep?  And what would I do once she woke up and freaked out?

I decided to take her for a looooong walk in her stroller around bedtime.  Lots of little bumps on the sidewalks along the way to gently jangle her off to sleep.   Sure enough, she went down and I felt like a champion. 

I walked her back to our house, which was set up on a small hill.  It was dark by then and I had forgotten to put on the porch light.  As I fumbled for the keys, desperate to maintain absolute silence, I clicked the little foot brake on the stroller into the “lock” position — or so I thought.  I unlocked the main door to my house and set the screen door latch thingy so that it would stay open while I brought my daughter into the house.  I turned around to grab her — and the stroller was gone.  Gone, baby, gone.

I remember looking up at the night sky.  Had a spaceship perhaps captured my daughter and her stroller in its tractor beam?  Nope, the sky was clear.  No close encounter here.

I squinted into the darkness.  And there she was, in my neighbor’s yard.

I had not set the foot brake properly.  The stroller had silently rolled down the hill in my front yard, across the street, and into my neighbor’s front yard.  All in all, it had probably rolled 100 feet away from me.  And my daughter was still asleep. 

When I think about this little incident, I think, “Wow, there are so many ways to lose the parenting game, it’s just terrifiying.” 

I also think, “Man, there may not be space aliens, but there is a God and He sometimes smiles down upon us, even when we don’t set the foot brake right.”

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