A missing boy....

It happens in a split second doesn’t it? One moment you’re browsing the underwear section, trying to decide between the Spanx or Charnos control pants for that dinner party, while the two-year-old tugs a rack of bras down on his head; the next moment he’s gone.

I lost my son in a mall once. He was two and a half at the time. We were in Marks and Spencer and he had freed himself from his buggy to look at the toys with his sister. He always did this and, unconcerned, I ventured over to a nearby section to browse the toiletries and cookery books, confident that both children would still be there when I returned. 

But when I did, five minutes later, I found my daughter leafing through a book, alone.

‘Where is Oscar?’  I demanded. ‘I don’t know’, she shrugged. ‘Can I have this?’ she held up a Disney Princess diary.

He must have followed me over to the toiletries, I told myself calmly. Yes that’s what happened.

Pushing the empty buggy, I wandered over to the toiletries. He was not there. He was not in the underwear section either. Or the food aisle. My knees started to slacken, my feet became light.

Giddily I retraced my steps once, twice, three times, scanning the area for his familiar dark curls, before appealing to a member of staff for help. Within a minute, word of the missing two-year-old had reached every security guard in the mall.

Throat tight with fear, my mind turned dark. Had a malevolent stranger seized upon the wandering toddler and calmly lead him out of my life forever? Children of that age are heart-breakingly trusting. He could be ten kilometres away by now, speeding towards another city - now eleven - now twelve. Soon he could be in another country.

Statistically a child has more chance of dying from falling out of bed than being abducted by a stranger, but when your child is missing, logic flies out the window.

Oscar had been missing for half an hour - thirty minutes – a lifetime. Every parent knows the sickening fear of losing sight of a child for thirty seconds in a busy place; your heart tilts ever so slightly on its axis, the blood thunders loudly in your head. But half an hour? I was starting to hyperventilate. Had he wandered into the stock room and been crushed by a falling pallet? Had he wandered out of the mall entrance and into the path of a speeding car? Was he still alive?

I hurried out of Marks and Spencer and into the mall, scouring each store, imploring security guards as I went; ‘please keep an eye out. He’s this high. He looks like a girl’.

He’d been gone for 45 minutes and I was beginning to doubt I would ever see him again. A woman walked past pushing a buggy. I peered in to get a better look at the child inside.

I had heard a story about a blonde girl being snatched in Disneyland. Security had been notified and a watch was set up on the exit. Many, many hours later, a man carrying a sleeping, dark-haired child approached the exit. The mother of the missing girl - who stood sentinel on the exit -  noticed the child was wearing the same red shoes as her own daughter. It was her daughter. She had been drugged and disguised with a wig.

This story unhelpfully elbowed its way into my mind as I helplessly searched for my son.

Then suddenly calm descended on me, I don’t know why - call it a sharp maternal instinct - but I suddenly knew with certainty where he was. I found myself heading to an area at the far side of the mall, under the escalators, where several small rides were located. Rounding the corner, I held a long breath. There he was, sitting on a motionless Bob the Builder ride, tinkering away with the knobs, blissfully unaware of the hour long ordeal I had endured, of the cavernous future which had briefly loomed ahead of me, punctuated by his loss. He looked up with a beaming smile, ‘mama!’

(An edited version of this column first appeared in Good Taste Magazine (Dubai) in January 2013.)