Last week in a parenting moment I wish I could take back, I almost lost one of my three children.
It wasn’t in the way I would have expected to lose sight of Chloe. I am always concerned she’ll slip under a rack of clothing in a department store, become disoriented from the strangely coloured skinny jeans, spin around and be spit out by the rainbow of legs facing a new and exciting Mommy-less direction. She’ll start sprinting towards the smell of mall popcorn quoting Braveheart’s “Freedom!!!!!” as she bolts away from me.
It didn’t happen that way.
Greg and I were watching Hanna from the observation deck at the pool while Chloe played at the water fountain behind us. I would glance back at her occasionally wondering if it was a good idea to let her lick the dispenser (this after playing in the ice hockey scrapings) and perhaps let my guard down knowing I had my spare set of eyes and extra set of hands in Greg standing next to me. How could we lose a kid when both parents were never more than four feet away from her?
I think I became hypnotized by the smell of chlorine and a sea of bathing caps lined up for a diving exercise and when I looked back at the fountain, Chloe wasn’t there.
I looked over my shoulder and then my whole body followed my head until I had spun completely around. I was certain I would see her two feet from the fountain (no mall popcorn to lure her away) and I would draw her closer to me when my heart started beating normally again.
No Chloe.
I asked Greg if Chloe had walked through the door towards the pool to get a better look at her sister but his instinct was to look at the fountain, the last place we had both seen her seconds earlier and presumably thought she still was.
Greg ran to the front doors of the Rec Centre and I ran down a series of ramps to the change rooms thinking there was no way she could have made it this far away in such a short amount of time and if (BIG IF) she had, she would never know what door to go through.
I heard her voice in the girl’s change room. The change room that seemed the length of two football fields away from the fountain. She was sitting on top of her sister’s swimming bag, kicking her boots off like she owned the place and grimacing at a little girl who asked her for a hug.
She had no idea she had done anything wrong and really, she hadn’t.
She is two and she likes to run. In her mind, she saw the opportunity to go for an unsupervised, light jog and she took it.
Trying to explain to her the dangers of racing away from Mommy and Daddy at this age is futile.
The best solution seemed to be a series of hugs that turned into one very long squeeze with no plan to let go…ever.
When I retell this horror story in the coming months and years about the time Greg was supposed to watch Chloe and totally blew it, all three kids will be in their harnesses with necklace whistles and Chloe will have a GPS band around her ankle.
Just in case there’s popcorn.
