It happened twice this month.
He was there, then he wasn’t. If you’re a parent, you probably know the drop-me-off-a-cliff sinking feeling. I lost my oldest daughter in a MacDonalds Play Place once…
This was different.
Jack was outside, and very supervised. When he disappeared, none of us panicked. We were sure he was in our landlord’s house. He loves to wander over there and make himself at home in their living room. There’s this one spot in the corner that the boy finds irresistible. But no. He wasn’t in the barn, or behind the shrubs either. He was simply gone.
That’s when we decided it was okay to pannick. I jumped into the van and started driving. Up a quarter mile to the next street. No dice. There was a trailer park there, but I didn’t want to start kicking doors over. Not yet. I turned around and went the other way. Past our driveway. Past an empty field. The nearest neighbors were a couple hundred yards away from our driveway. When I approached their house, I saw a small congregation of adults huddled together. When I hit the break, I got a visual. There he was. Dirty-faced and shoeless, two matching fruit strips in hand. (Jack has to match. Always.)
They already had the police on the line, which I was grateful for. He had been running down the center of the road without a care in the world. Who knows where he was going? Sara would walk down with him a few days later to find what the attraction was, but there was nothing there. It made me want to go Hank Hill on him: “Dang it, Bobby! Don’t ever do that again!”
But he did. Last week, I was camping a few hours away, and Sara had the kids at our friend’s house. They were all playing together so nice until big sisters forgot about him. Just for a moment. Just in time for another neighbor to scoop him out of the road and call the police, who came out after Sara had already recovered him. One of the officers has an autistic son, so he understood.
When Autistic Kids Wander
Sara went in to the police station the other day, armed with a photograph and a description. If your autistic child wanders, I highly advise you to do the same. The cops were super helpful, like public servants ought to be. So if Jack wanders again, they’re going to be here in a flash. And if someone else happens to find him, they’ll know who the little blonde boy is. That’s a little comforting.
Needless to say, we’re keeping our doors locked at all hours, and looking into electronic child locators (Duracel ran a great ad with one a while back; we might check it out.) But the hardest part is that the boy just doesn’t sense danger. He is fascinated by fast moving objects and loud noises. Whenever he gets a whiff of fresh air, he tries to b-line it to the road. Scary stuff. More things to pray over, I guess.
It’s not like we needed a reminder that our boy is different, and that our lives might never be the same. But then again, this all happened during an “up” season of sign language, verbal requests, and peeing in the toilet. We didn’t forget, but Jack’s autism became, for a while anyway, an afterthought.
It was nice.