Lost

by Patti


S is a pretty responsible kid.

Despite being closer to 11 years old than my heart can handle, she still holds my hand in parking lots and when we cross the street, she obeys rules, she respects computer, cell phone and television boundaries, and she even corrects me when I cuss. Which I do. A lot.

But, man, does she lose EVERYTHING.

In the past few months alone, she has lost her:

Cell phone
Glasses
Sunglasses
iPod
Library book

This is an expensive list of stuff to lose, and everything on it? Lost. Gone. Cannot be found.

I imagine there is a black hole in the universe totally jam-packed with all the stuff she has lost in her short lifetime. There are undoubtedly a billion single socks in there, thousands of Polly Pockets and their annoyingly tiny fashions, a few backpacks, at least 5 sets of earphones, a library of books, her 2nd grade Very Important Math Assignment, that Christmas C.D. her grandfather gave her… MY MIND.

It drives me absolutely insane how she can be so scatterbrained about her things.

One morning last year I got to work and, as I usually do when I get to my desk, I reached into my purse to pull out my cell phone. It wasn’t there. I frantically dug through it for a good 10 minutes, but it was nowhere to be found. I went out to my car to see if I’d left it charging, and it wasn’t there. Then I remembered my earlier pit stop at CVS, where I screeched into a parking spot and jumped out of the car, in a hurry as usual. Had I forgotten the phone was on my lap and it then fell out when I jumped out of the car? Did I take it in the store with me, and then absentmindedly place it on a shelf while I browsed? I went back to my desk and called CVS to see if anybody has turned in a cell phone. Of course not.

During my lunch break, I went back to the CVS parking lot and searched it, looking for the phone. It was February and blustery, and we had recently had a record snowfall, and there I was, hunched over the icy parking lot like some mad cartoon detective. If the phone had fallen, it has surely fallen straight into a mountain of that snow and sunk to its arctic death by now.

That is when I had to accept it: I had lost it. It was expensive, it had years of photos and videos stored on it, every single contact I ever knew was programmed into it. And it was gone.

Worse: It was the 2nd cell phone I had lost in as many years.

I also lost my house key.

My car key.

My sunglasses.

My friend’s book she had loaned me.

And that black hole in the universe? Well, another one had to be created just to store all of the crap I have lost. Because in my lifetime, I have lost a lot of crap.

Apparently, I passed on the Lose Everything gene to my kid, and I wonder if that means I should give her a pass of sorts; an “It’s okay, me too, wink-wink” kind of pass.

But I can’t. Because the cycle must end.

I know from experience, there is nothing fun about losing stuff. It is frustrating, and makes you feel bad, and just plain sucks because sometimes that stuff you lose is pretty important stuff.

So yeah, I get frustrated with S and I guess that makes me a total hypocrite.

But isn’t that parenthood: one big, fat, shameless ball of hypocrisy?