Child Gets Lost

When I was roughly Kina’s age, my family went to a July 4th celebration on a big plaza in town—a 70s-era landscape of yellow-brick ramps and shallow ziggurats, anchored by a fountain and ringed with trees. (Why we stopped building plazas as a civilization eludes me, but I digress.) A brass band played marches somewhere outside the view of my long-term memory as I ran heedlessly across the plaza. I remember the entire episode today from the geographic perspective of where my parents were sitting, because in this episode, I fell, skinned my knee, and couldn’t find my family. I remember a stranger carrying me or walking me across the plaza as the band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a march that still triggers anxiety in me, for this reason). I imagine we found my parents quickly, since the crowd in my memory was sparse—and the park must have been quite small—but that sense of being apart and being in need is something that is now firmly affixed in my brain.

I tell you all of this because Kina, yesterday, took her scooter across the playground at our local park while Laurea and I were talking. We paid it no mind, as she’s been getting more and more independent, but it soon became apparent that Kina had gone farther afield than any of us are used to. The two of us fanned out across the playground to look for her—on the swings, under the playsets, by the concrete turtles. Nada. It was only after I walked out of the only entrance to the playground and took a survey of the area that I saw her standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by friendly adults, bereft and weeping inconsolably. As I shouted her name and sprinted towards her, I found myself immediately the picture of a parent whose child has been lost.

Being untethered from the part of yourself that you most cherish is an unsettling thing at the best of times, but there is little, it turns out, that is more anxiety-inducing than thinking your child has vanished—as unlikely as that actually is. I grew up roaming freely through my neighborhoods at an age not that different from Kina’s, and I rarely felt the sense of separation I did yesterday for those three minutes looking for my daughter, with the crucial exception of that moment on the yellow-brick plaza with the tubas and a skinned knee. We do not actually know, as children, how fragile and precious the connections to our parents are, until we need them. As parents today, we are cognizant all the time of that connection, knowing that the force of our protection weakens exponentially with distance. I still feel that it’s important to allow Kina to define and protect her own boundaries, but in a world so governed by fear and vigilance, it takes real effort. She will be all right. We will be all right. “Give me space,” she’s been saying lately. I’m trying.

After yesterday’s brief alarm, we hopped into the car (still piney from the Christmas tree we took to the mulching machines in the park), clarified that Kina needed to tell us whenever she walked off, and drove off for lunch. Kina forgot in ten minutes that anything had happened, and she hasn’t mentioned it since. I hope yesterday’s episode of absence isn’t fixed forever in her memory, but if it is, I hope she remembers me running to her in my giant puffy blue jacket and sweeping her up into my arms, and not the tears she shed while I was gone.

Today’s Parade cover is crayoned by Kina and taped by Laurea, and depicts the garden at her school, which she has never really seen. It’s beautiful.

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