Fearless

When I got home from work tonite, my kids' nanny told me a harrowing tale about nearly losing them while on an outing.

Mac is my older son.  He is almost 8 years old, and has high-functioning autism.  Mac has a long history of running away and/or disappearing in crowds.  He used to actively run away from us, thinking it was an hilarious game. The more you yelled after him to come back, the funnier he thought it was, and the harder (and farther) he ran.  He did this one time in a Target when he was 6.  He managed to get in between some of the clothes racks, and, just like that, he was gone.  I immediately had visions of him running out the front doors and into the parking lot.  As the minutes ticked by, I began to get more and more panicked.  The store put out the word to all the Target employees, and they finally found him crouched down in an aisle far away from where I had lost sight of him.

His mother, therapists and I worked with him for months and months. He finally quit playing the "running" game.  Whether he just outgrew it, or responded to the therapy, I'm not sure.

Now, instead of running away, he will just wander.  A few months ago, I was with him at the San Diego zoo.  I was with both my parents and his aunt and uncle.  We had stopped at a concession stand to sit and rest for a moment.  Mac was looking at some animals close by.  His uncle, sitting next to me, asked me a question.  I turned, responded, turned back and Mac was gone.  I ran down one direction, couldn't find him.  I ran the other direction.  I still couldn't find him.  All family members were looking for him.  Again, the minutes ticked by, and the panic rose and rose.  Finally,  Mac came back of his own accord.

We've spoken with him over and over again about the dangers of getting lost.  Each time we have the conversation, he seems to get it for awhile.  He'll stick close to us, he'll come back when called.  But then, when our guard is down, he eventually will forget and it will happen again.  Our warnings get increasingly more dire.  We are all but at the point of saying, "if you get lost from us, a bad person will take you away from us, forever, and kill you."  So far, nothing we've said has stuck.

Today it happened again.  Our nanny had taken the boys (Mac and his 5 year old brother) to the bike path in Santa Monica to ride their razors, while she walked.  It didn't take long before the boys were tired of riding slowly next to her and took off down the path.  She did her best to catch up to them, yelled at them to come back, but they didn't listen.  Eventually they were out of sight.  She hurried down the path, panicked.  She came to a three-way fork, and didn't know which way to go.  She looked down one street and saw a police car and officers gathered and imagined they had been hit by a car.  Many minutes passed, and they eventually returned down the path, big smiles on both their faces.  Our nanny has been with us since Mac was 3 months old, and she's seen pretty much everything he can dish out.  She said she had never been so scared.  She told the boys that she would no longer take them out to ride razors because of what they did.

I spoke with Mac about what happened tonite.  He recognized that he had made the nanny extremely scared and angry.  He said that he had had a "sad day" because of what happened.  I once again reminded him that his mommy and daddy (and nanny) loved him, that it was our job to protect him, and that if we didn't know where he was we couldn't protect him.  He seemed to understand, but will it stick?