Well Then Don’t Wander Off!

Years after getting lost, when Tony was a young teenager and thought he didn’t have to stay near me in the store, I often had a problem keeping track of him when we went to ToysRUs.  He was pretty good though, asking if he could go play with the video games.  I usually said yes or would ask him to first help me find something or pick something out then he could go play video games.  That worked.  However, as he got used to this, he’d go off to the video game section and when I came there to find him, he wasn’t there.

This was in the early 90’s when there was a lot of press about teens getting nabbed and never seen alive again, some of which had disappeared from toy stores or pizza places.  So when I couldn’t find him, his sisters and I would go looking all over the store until we found him.  Usually, it was a matter of him having been side-tracked on his way to find us.  But this was still upsetting to me because you just don’t know when it will be YOUR child on the news or YOUR family in those Amber Alerts (well, this was actually pre-Amber alerts and pre-Code Adam), but get the idea.  Once found, I would ask him to please not wander off again.  Sometimes it would take the girls and I more than ten minutes to find him and that is ten minutes too long for a mom to be worried about her son!

One day, when he was about fourteen, he asked if he could go look at the video game demos.  I said yes but please don’t wander off.  Stay in the video game section.  He said he would.  The girls and I went about our business finding what we had gone to find and then we headed for the video game section.  Tony wasn’t there.  I checked up and down the aisles in the video game area and adjacent to it, just to make sure.  No sign of Tony.

Then I got mad.  I decided then and there that I was not going to play this game again.  Fourteen is just too old to get lost in a store.  So instead of going up and down all of the aisles at this huge Toys R Us store and wasting ten or fifteen minutes, I walked up to the Customer Service desk and told them I could not find my son and could they please page him for me.  They took his name and paged him over the loud speaker:  “Tony, your mom is waiting for you at the Customer Service desk.  Please meet her there, Tony.” And of course, they also added his last name.  I thanked the woman and waited about twenty seconds and around the corner comes Tony with this look-that-could-have-killed-me on his face!  He walked up to me and tersely said, “Mom, that’s really embarrassing.  Please don’t have me paged again.”  So I said, “Well, not finding you where you are supposed to be is really upsetting to me so if you don’t wander off again, I won’t have to page you again.”   He mumbled what I think was probably an agreement but I’m not sure because I couldn’t hear it.  We paid for our stuff and off we went.

Tony NEVER wandered off in stores again.  He made sure he was where he said he would be when I came looking for him!  And I never had to page him again, either.  We both kept our word.