Lost Children

the great parenting surrender

Amazonas, Brazil

Being a child of the 80s, I ate my cereal staring at the faces of missing kids on milk containers. And I have a hangover suspicion, always, that I will go missing. Or one of my children will go missing. Or we will all go missing, and no one will ever find anyone they love ever again. 

But I also relish the idea of being the missing, at last returned. The promise of a reunion, the truest expression of love. I hid from my mother, constantly. In department store clothing racks, behind produce piles in grocery stores, in our house’s linen closet. But no one came looking, and bored at last with waiting, I’d emerge to find my mother still shrieking hangers across a metal garment rack, indifferent to my missingness. The unacknowledged prodigal daughter. (To her credit, she came screaming, an eagle with jean skirt flapping, when a couple opened their car door to me on the curb outside our house.)

Even as an adult, I relish the return. It’s part of the reason, I think, that I live abroad.

Today is my eldest’s eleventh birthday. Gus was the only child I was separated from postpartum— sent to the NICU for pneumothorax. When they took him, it was like a part of myself— the most essential part—went missing.

I delivered him in a Brazilian hospital and my broken Portuguese deserted me in the days after his birth, when the world spun and my head pounded every time I sat or stood up, a post-dural puncture that went undiagnosed for five days. But in the moments I could hold Gus, stolen from his oxygen tube, I was sure I could punch a hurricane if need be.

When we brought him home, I lost the milk. I’d put it in the cupboard instead of the fridge after pouring salt in my coffee. 

When he was six, I lost him. 

He had thick blond hair, always a little untamed, blue glasses and a very round head. He looked a little like the kid in Jerry Maguire.

I’d taken Gus and his younger brother Rafe to see Dora the Explorer in the theater. It was the third bathroom request and the movie’s climax and Rafe refused to budge. I told Gus to go and hustle back. At some point, rapt by Dora (it was the first movie I’d seen in a while, I had another infant at home), I realized Gus wasn’t back and I didn’t know how much time had elapsed. I left Rafe in the theater and ran to the bathroom. Not there. I demanded the ticket collector check the men’s room. No one there. 

I ran back to Rafe, dragged him from theater to theater. Nine in total. No Gus. I told the person working the concession stand who called the manager. He also checked each room. Nothing. We interrogated the ticket collector, who reported seeing no child leaving on his own. Though I knew Gus would never leave—on his own accord.  

We pulled up the CCTV footage and started to comb. If you have ever looked for your child in CCTV footage, you will understand the sudden split in consciousness between the imperative to look harder than you’ve ever looked before and the understanding that what you see might end your life.  

At what point could we contact the authorities? How had I been so cavalier about a six-year-old going to the bathroom by himself? Who might take a six-year-old boy? What would that person have planned for a six-year-old boy?  How was I so distracted by Dora? 

And then a shout. The manager had found a missing boy!

Instead of going left at the proscenium, Gus had gone right, through an exit door. He’d been trapped in a dark hallway by himself for 30 minutes. He was sodden and sobbing. 

In The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about grieving her husband, Joan Didion writes about an epiphany on an escalator. As she’s passing people descending on the other side, she realizes no one is alive anymore who will see her, always, as 25. Her husband is dead. And indeed, my husband’s receding hairline startles me: I have his 25-year-old mane locked in. 

But my children are different. Today their selves are distinct from last year’s selves. They shift radically, their transformations impossible to miss. I relish their transformations and miss their former selves, the skins they’ve shed. 

At eleven, Gus is a stretched version of his former self, with a jawline like the crest of a wave. He looked like a teenager in the dark the other night when I came in to check on his youngest brother, asleep on the floor beside him. He hefts his younger brothers into canoes. He and I wear each other’s sweatshirts. He is pissed at me for not declaring a bag of dried hibiscus flowers on a flight home from Mexico. He holds my hand in public, except right outside of school, and we’re working on a book together about misunderstood birds. Rooks, seagulls, magpies.

We are the quiet ones in our family and last week we swam across Walden Pond. We stopped in the middle to float in the silence, a bald eagle circling above us. But the depth made him nervous—at its center, Walden is 100 feet deep—so I rolled over to swim the remainder of the way with him. When I plunged down into the dark, his hand grabbed at mine and I kicked back up to air and light and “Wait for me!” the splinter of anxiety betraying his laughter. He is old enough now to know most fears are absurd. And still.

Being a parent is about missing many people always— so many versions of our children disappear, will disappear. Not in department stores, as I feared as a child. But in growing, in living. There is that desire of an impossible reunion with who they were, too. My children have no memory of most of these former selves, but I do. What I would give to hold Gus’s 10-month-old self who we took into the Amazon and fatted with papaya and maracuja, and his three-year-old self who protested potty training by lying down on the rug and lisping “Let it Go”, and the seven-year-old who cut his youngest brother’s umbilical cord, hands shaking but steadied by his grandmother’s around them. I want to pick up the child with urine soaked pants stuck in a dark annex of the movie theater again and again and again. 

It is constant, this need to readjust my eyes as a mother. Just when I think I’ve really seen my child, like a trick of light, he becomes something new and foreign. I seek out the familiar first—like the dimple he gets when he’s both overjoyed and intent on something—and then the rest of him slowly comes into focus, returned!, but the substance and form are slightly altered. 

When they are babies, our children are simultaneously everything we can imagine and also almost nothing. And then each year, our imaginings become less and their beings become more, and it feels both intensely tragic and unbelievably magical that once we held this child in the center of our bodies and dreams and shared all those cells. And now they are here at the center of a pond, asking us to wait. And in five more years, they are there, waving from another shore. 

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Many thanks to Jeff Berger-White and Camilo Moreno-Salamanca for taking the time to read and gift feedback this week.