Losing a child

This morning while cruising through Facebook I saw one of those “harried mom” memes in which the mom said she must be doing okay because she hadn’t lost any of her children or pets today. I get that. Losing your kid in an airport, or mall, or parking lot is really horrible. I never exactly had that experience with Sarah because she was not mobile and we did not have to chase her around, but I can sympathize with the worry and I’ve watched a few heart-wrenching documentaries about missing kids.

The fact that I have now lost a sixteen year-old child seems very careless of me. I could not keep track of her, one of the primary duties of a parent. It makes me think somehow of those old 70’s cop shows where the police would show up when a teenager was missing and tell the mother “She probably just ran off to see her friends.” And the mother would say “No, I know there is something wrong, she wouldn’t do that.” But the police won’t listen and would refuse to take a report. Now of course we have Amber Alerts and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Sarah’s picture could be on a milk carton. Except she’s not lost or missing. I have to accept that.

When Polly our beagle was young, she went missing for short periods of time pretty regularly. We adopted her at a year old from the Humane Society. We had zero experience of dogs but Sarah really, really wanted a dog. We had been on the waiting list for a service dog organization for a couple of years when Sarah was five or so, but she began to make it clear that she wanted a dog, NOW, and she didn’t care whether it was a service dog. So we took ourselves off the list for Canine Companions for Independence (a great organization) and headed over to the shelter and met Polly (whose name was once Rhoda), who loved Sarah right away and connected with her.

We had no idea that different breeds of dog had different personalities and that beagles were, shall we say, the ultimate escape artists. The first time I took Polly for a walk, I just assumed she would want to play fetch, would come when I called her, and would want to be near me. Little did I know that she could be in the next county chasing a rabbit or squirrel the moment a ball (which she had zero interest in) was thrown. During her young years, we had many Polly-chasing and Polly-recalling incidents, even after we learned never to let a beagle off-leash. (Now that she’s eleven, she’s much more clingy.) Perhaps we were living out some parenting experiences we didn’t have with Sarah.