Mid-term Version Vanishing Act

Vanishing Act - Final

I vaguely remember the sirens wailing in the background, or the hours spent in the tiniest room in the house. Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, because by the time they got home my eyes had fresh sand in the corners and my mouth tasted bitter.

I was 5, maybe 6 years old, when my brother and I decided to play a rousing game of Hide and Go Seek, a personal favorite. After game after game of being found almost instantly, probably due to my brother peeking, I came to the conclusion that I was going to win this time.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland,  with sprawling lawns and numerous woods. The houses were spread far enough for privacy and quick walks, supervised from the window by mom. My house and yard had more privacy than any other in the neighborhood, due to the fact that when we built the house when I was three, we also planted 100 evergreen trees surrounding the property. All of the other kids in the neighborhood were years older than me, leaving me to adventure by myself in the quiet woods.

Nothing bad had ever happened in my neighborhood. The most scandalous news was when my neighbor dozed off while driving back to her house and ran into a small tree. The younger tree that replaced it, always reminds me of how boring my neighborhood really is.

My mother never had to reveal her overprotective-self, because I was always visible from the abundance of windows in the house. There were no parks to walk to, no stores to get a snack from, nothing that I would need permission to go out and do. And that goes for games too.

My brother rarely wanted to play outside with me. He's two years older than me and way too mature to play kiddy games. But we both had a mutual love for Hide and Go Seek.

Whether it was late in the summer or already Fall, the season didn't matter. The evergreens that surrounded the lawn showed no sign of seasonal change, so the images in my mind don't match to a specific time of year.

As my brother began to count down from twenty, my eye was focused on the evergreens. As I ran away from my brother and towards the trees, I remember thinking, "There's no way he'll ever find me." And boy was I right.

The only house that is directly adjacent to my house is never locked. Ever since I can remember, either the garage or front door was open, even if no one was home. I guess I knew in the back of my mind as I ran away from my house, I would be able to hide in another. What I didn't expect, was for it to be so easy.

One of their cars was parked in the driveway underneath their basketball hoop, so as I snuck through their garage to the inside door, I expected to have to negotiate my way in. Something along the lines of "I need to win at Hide and Go Seek, and my brother would never look for me here," would suffice. But I didn't need it, because after waiting about 15 seconds at an unanswered door, I tried the handle. It opened and I was in. No need to explain why I was there. I could just hang out for a little while in their house, no big deal. Except, what if my brother was smart enough to come looking at the neighbor's house, then he'd find me. No, I had to hide in their house. I couldn't just be sitting at the door waiting to be found.

Even now, in our neighborhood, people rarely visit each others' houses. We don't have barbecue block parties, nor do we have a tight-knit community. The only time my neighbors come over is when their dogs have run into our lawn.

So there I was, walking through the house, looking for a perfect spot to hide, as if my brother was counting in the other room and not the other backyard.

The first room in the house when entering from the garage is the kitchen. I originally passed over it, thinking it didn't have any place large enough to hide in. But then, I heard my stomach rumble, and my brain switched momentarily, from hiding, to snacking.

My mother is the most crunchy granola person I know, she even makes her own granola just to reinforce the point. Every day she either goes for a 6-mile run or does one of her hundreds of workout videos. Her healthy lifestyle doesn't end with her workouts she has been a vegan for the past 25 years. My father, on the other hand, was raised on red-meat. Every year our freezer is refilled with the meat of a cow we got at auction. My parents are total opposites. But one thing they agree on is that we can never have junk food in the house. The closest thing I ever got to junk food was the organic version of goldfish kept in the back of the pantry. We have never had white bread in the house, or anything processed or chemically enhanced. Basically, a child's nightmare.

But I must have known that I would find the equivalent of "Wonderland" inside my neighbor's pantry. It left me feeling like Alice: chocolate, chips, real goldfish, gummy bears, nutella, cheetos, gushers, you name it, the pantry had it. All of the foods my parents forbid in our house were beckoning me. I didn't even stop to think that my brother hadn't ventured over to the neighbor's house to find me.

Hours later, footsteps nearby woke me. Since the pantry door was closed, I had drifted asleep in the darkness. My neighbors were shocked, but relieved to find me curled in their petite pantry. I didn't understand why until they walked me back over to my yard.

Police were swarming around my house, trailing out into the woods. Search and rescue helicopters were hovering above the vast woods behind my house. My parents were speaking with the authorities when my neighbor tapped them on the shoulder and gestured below to me. Apparently I had chocolate covering my face, but my neighbor reassured my health-nut mother that when she found me, surrounded by wrappers galore, there was a banana peel too.

According to journalist, Hanna Rosin, author of the Atlantic article "The Overprotected Kid," parents have become more and more involved in their children's lives. Rosin states that "parents these days have little tolerance for children’s wandering on their own," and this rings true for my parents especially. The woods I had previously independently explored, became an activity that required permission. My parents’ tolerance disappeared when I did. Within one day my freedom vanished. I was barely gone more than a few hours, yet my parents were too panicked and worried to trust me being on my own outside the house.

Years later, on spring break in New York City with my family, I got separated again. I had been on the subway and my navigational brother had mentioned that we were on the wrong subway. Being the youngest, I was used to always being last. So as the doors to the subway were closing, I jumped through them to the other side. My parents screamed and banged on the doors begging them to be reopened.

Obviously, it was a bit more serious than when I went missing when I was little. But I had always been overprotected, shielded from most of the dangers in the world. As I sat on the subway platform, crying, I remember thinking how mad my parents would be that I had disobeyed them. Rosin observes that most children "take it for granted that they are always being watched." Without my parents watching over me in a swarming subway station, I migrated towards the nearest police officer, standing near an emergency station. She noticed the tears streaming from my eyes immediately, and held my hand for almost two hours until my parents returned from the other side of Hudson river.

Without my family, I didn't know what to do in a public space. The only instinct I had was to look for a mother with children or a police officer, personnel my mother had told me to find in case of emergency. I rarely had moments of freedom, and although I was nervous and scared, I was also unlimited. My parents instilled a sense of protected-ness from a young age. Like Rosin said, I took it for granted that I was always being watched. After the "Hide and Go Seek" game gone wrong, I had never ventured too far from the yard. But being in a crowded subway platform, without anyone looking for me, part of me felt relieved. My parents returned over an hour later, hysterical even though Rosin states that “all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago.”

Now that I'm older, I think about how different my parents would have raised me if I hadn't disappeared that day. My brother was granted more freedoms than I ever had, I wasn't allowed a Facebook until I was 17, whereas my brother made one when he was 13. My parents seemed to treat me as if I was always going to vanish, keeping me home and out of danger. According to Rosin, my over-protective parents hindered my development and I missed out on many experiences. Sometimes it feels like that, but I know my parents weren't being over-protective to hurt me, they used their over-protectiveness to keep me safe from dangers that didn’t really exist.

My parents use my disappearance story as an introduction for me nowadays. It's an embarrassment tactic, but I sometimes I can't help but think what would have happened if I had vanished. Would my brother have been raised like I was afterwards? Even now that I’m college, my mother will ask me where I’ll be each weekend, because she “likes to know where her children are.” I do wonder when the checking in will end, and whether my brother receives the same texts. Thankfully, I was found, but my mother never lets me forget about my binging on junk food. And after the story is done, I reassure her, I ate a banana too.