Picture this:

I'm in an argument with my father-in-law. I'm losing. Whatever ground I started on has dissolved beneath me, and it’s getting embarrassing. 

"Well. At least I didn't lose a four-year-old in a cherry orchard."

Argument over. I walk away, head held high.

Last week, our daughter went cherry-picking with her Papa (my father-in-law). At some point that afternoon I remember thinking, with no alarm whatsoever, “They've been picking cherries for hours!”

They got home and right away something seemed off. 

"Someone got lost."

They were picking cherries together, and at some point she initiated a game of hide-and-seek. Going behind trees mostly. Then she wandered off. Over a hill and down the far side, where she found a good hiding spot. 

After about twenty minutes of not being found, she started crying, thinking that Papa had left her there for good. After about thirty minutes, two strangers found her. They walked her over to an orchard employee and the employee drove her back to Papa. Thank goodness.

For our daughter, the whole thing was a net positive experience. She was sad and scared for a while, but then she got to ride in the front seat of a truck, unbuckled. “UNBUCKLED, Dad” she said, with wonder in her eyes.

So inconsequential for her (I think? who knows, maybe it'll surface as a suppressed trauma someday… I doubt it) and so terrifying and loaded for every adult involved. We spiraled for days. The What Ifs are always 10x worse than the reality.

Papa spent those thirty minutes certain he would never see her again. Not lost. Gone. He thought she'd been eaten by a cougar. A cougar. A fucking cougar?! I didn’t even realize that was a possibility. Is that better or worse than an abduction??

He didn’t say it outright, but we know that afternoon contained some of the most terrifying, darkest thoughts of his life.

But I suppose that’s the price you pay for losing a game of hide-and-seek with a child.

Modern parents will swear up and down that we want certain things for our kids, and then the second we get them, we lose our shit. 

I want her to go to cherry orchards with her grandparents. I think I want her to get at least a little bit lost. Not abducted, obviously. Not mauled. But the odds on those feel low. A kid should get to disappear over a hill every now and then!

"Go make some memories! Not all who wander are lost!" we say. 

And then it actually happens, and next thing you know you've spent an entire evening weighing the pros and cons of sitting your own parents down for some light scolding.

A few decades ago, getting lost in a cherry orchard was just part of being a kid. 

You'd go pick cherries, lose your way for a day or two, and stumble back into town with some cool stories and a new scar. Your parents barely noticed. 

We are soft.

Our daughter now knows not to wander off, and if she gets lost, to stay put. And my father-in-law learned that when you take your granddaughter cherry picking, the cherry yield is not the primary concern. 

I got something too. 

Whenever my wife loses something, her keys, her gigantic water bottle, her phone somewhere inside our own house, I get to shake my head condescendingly and say:

“Hmm… Cherry doesn't fall far from the tree.”

Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).