There was once a harrowing day in my life when my daughter, who was then three, was missing.  I was inside and thought she was outside with her dad; he was outside and thought she was in with me.  We are really not sure how long she was gone.

But at dinnertime when I was rounding up the troops, we couldn’t find her.  We looked under beds, behind bushes, under covers, in closets.  As the reality of the fact that she was GONE slowly set in, panic gripped my throat, and we called the police to report a missing child.  We called family and friends, and before long the word had spread and they were all canvassing the neighborhood looking for her.  I was sobbing.

I began to go door to door to houses of people in my neighborhood that I barely knew to ask if they had seen my child.  One such woman answered the door and had my daughter beside her.  It turns out she babysat several children and my daughter had heard their laughter and wandered to her house in search of some fun.  She had been taught never to leave the yard.  Yeah, right.

When something like this happens, the first thing you do is rejoice in the safe return of your child.  Then you want to kill ‘em for making you so worried.

I hugged her, kissed her, ran back to my home, where by now several police cars were parked, and screamed “I found her!”  Then I explained to my daughter how worried we all had been, that she should never have left the yard, and did she realize that the police were looking all over for her?

She wouldn’t leave my side the rest of the night.  Hours later as I was tucking her in bed, she asked, “Are the policemen gone?”

“Yes,” I said.  “They’re gone.”

A look of relief washed over her face. 

“Why?” I asked.  “The police were here to help.”

“Well, you said the police were looking for me.  I thought they were going to take me to jail for leaving the yard.”

Now, this is probably not a bad thing for a three-year-old to think, so you can imagine my mixed feelings about telling her the truth.  But then I remembered something that happened to me when I was little.

I was five years old.  My brother, his friend, and I decided to go on a picnic, so we loaded up some wienies and buns and headed over to a field near our house.  We started a little fire to roast our wienies on.  We thought we were so big.  Before we knew it, the fire jumped across to some brush and the fire was out of control.  We ran.  My brother and his friend ran to get help; I ran and hid under my bed.

You see, I was pretty sure I was going to jail.  I heard the sirens of the fire trucks wail by.  I heard neighbors shouting and the door to my house slam open and shut a thousand times.  Nobody missed me yet, and I thought that was good.  I didn’t want to be found and sent to jail.  I lay there for hours.

My mom ended up finding me, and I didn’t go to jail after all.  She hugged me and reassured me that the police were there to help us and would not take little children to jail.  I remember how warm and fuzzy she made me feel.

So I told my daughter the same thing.

Then I told her that if she EVER did that again, I would nail one of her feet to the floor.