The Missing Ring

It wasn’t your first Christmas Eve.

You were born two weeks before Christmas, and so spent that those first weeks of your life bombarded by the sounds of holiday songs, the flickering light of bad Hallmark movies streaming on the television, and the smell of sweets I entertain each December. In the haze of your new life, I can’t imagine you registered much at all, besides that you were hungry, and besides that this world outside your mother’s belly was colder and brighter and in so many ways harder than the little world in which all you had to do was exist to survive.

Your mother and I? Despite the exhilaration at your safe arrival, and despite our efforts to celebrate the holiday, were also sleep-deprived and consumed with worries. We thought we had prepared for you only to find out that the most ubiquitous advice of all—that no one is really prepared to parent—was the most true.

Your first Christmas came and went with little fanfare, the night topped with a drive to the CVS that was open on the holiday to buy gripe water we weren’t sure would help you, but we thought might assuage your crying after we’d exhausted what other options we could think of.

Fast forward a year.

You had grown. You were larger by every dimension, crawling and curious, and though you still cried at times each day, you also laughed every day at tickles and songs and sounds we couldn’t decipher the humor from, but kept making because they seemed to please you. You could feed yourself, not with a spoon, but by hand or, equally, but putting your face down to pick up what you wanted with your mouth.

We made plans to go out to dinner Christmas Eve at a Chili’s. A silly thing, but your mother’s family had a history of going out there, and it was my favorite chain restaurant of its ilk, and I loved their ribs. You were in a sweet spot, content to sit in a high chair for the length of at least a short meal.

On the drive to Chili’s, I realized my wedding ring was gone.

I’ve always had skinny fingers, and had never worn any ring with any regularity until your mother and I married. The morning after we got hitched, I wore the ring until I didn’t—realizing that sometime amidst packing wedding gifts in boxes, washing dishes, and tending to any other number of banal chores in our Air BnB, the ring had slipped from my ring finger. I found it in one of the gift boxes after a half hour of searching, and it would become the first of many times that the ring fell loose or was misplaced. I took to only wearing the ring out, not around the house, and scarcely when engaged in any physical labor like packing boxes to move.

The ring slipping culminated the better part of a year into our marriage, when it fell from my hand and hit the floor just right to break. I replaced with a ring a half-size smaller that fit snugger, though still not perfectly.

That the ring would go missing that Christmas Eve, on the way to Chili’s was not, in and of itself, cause for panic. It always turned up.

But you’d started feeding yourself just weeks before. Crunchy snacks made for babies your size, and pieces of teething wafers that we broke loose for you. But also scraps of facial tissue or toilet paper that you gleefully ripped loose, and stray Cheerios that you found on the floor after one of us had spilled them who-knows-how-many days before.

By the time we parked at Chili’s I’d figured two likely places where the ring would be found. One, the most likely, was in your play yard—a large, plastic, hexagonal structure we used to contain you in those moments when needed to step out of the room and keep you safe. When I had put you down in there for a moment before heading out for dinner, I had heard something drop but couldn’t tell what, and in retrospect figured it was likely the ring. The other likely location was in the car itself, likely as not in that gap between the driver’s seat and car door where the ring had fallen before when I was adjusting the seat, fastening my seat belt, or otherwise getting situated to drive.

A third possibility dawned on me, though. That I had heard something drop in your play yard. That you were feeding yourself. That your mother, more than once, had caught you feeding yourself not only food or things as innocuous (if non-ideal) as tissue, but mystery objects that you put in your mouth and crawled away so we couldn’t be sure what it was and were only grateful that it didn’t seem to be anything dangerous, though we became more and more conscious of keeping anything dangerous from your reach.

To cut the chase, I thought you might have swallowed my wedding ring.

It didn’t seem likely. The ring was bigger and more solid than anything you were accustomed to swallowing, and you were never shy about expressing your displeasure if you were hurt. Surely if you had swallowed the ring, you’d be more upset. You were breathing normally, and there was no visible sign that the ring was lodged in your throat.

Of course you hadn’t swallowed the ring.

And yet, I Googled. I wasn’t the first person to Google this question or similar. It turned out kids your age swallowed all kinds of things from jewelry to nuts and bolts to puzzle pieces. As I’d grown accustomed to a year before, all of the advice came at cross-purposes. The insistence that if it weren’t obstructing airways, there was nothing to do but wait for the object to pass through a child’s system. The warning that children in such a scenario should always go to the hospital.

Your mother and I are good partners. We love each other and we love you. We are hard workers. We are reasonably smart.

We are not good at calming each other’s anxieties when we’re both worked up.

My initial pass through the car hadn’t revealed the ring, and so as we awaited our appetizer chips and salsa and I began feeding you a Corn, Kale, and Quinoa puree, your mother returned to search the car again.

Ruling out the car, we determined the ring was either in your play yard or inside of you.

We spent the meal worried, alternately searching the Internet for advice and admonishing the other to stop, because the ring was probably safe at home, so we shouldn’t ruin Christmas Eve dinner worrying.

We got through dinner, not so much savoring as wolfing down food. To your credit, you seemed oblivious to the panic, enjoying the food we’d brought for you and sampling from the chicken strips and side of mashed potatoes we ordered you at the restaurant.

I readied myself for Christmas Eve at the emergency room. If we couldn’t find the ring, we’d want to know for sure, and if the ring did end up obstructing something in your innards or poisoning you—well, those weren’t risks that your mother or I were going to take.

We didn’t talk on the car ride home. I don’t remember specifically, but I have to assume that my playlist of Christmas cheer played from the speakers, ineffectual to the mood of the car. I watched you in the mirror attached to backseat, passenger side headrest so I could see you while I drove. I watched for anything different.

At home, I rushed ahead, while your mother loosened the straps from your car seat and gathered your diaper bag.

And there, in your play yard, in plain sight was the ring.

I thought a silent prayer of thanks over our own modest Christmas Eve miracle, not the stuff of Hallmark movies or Scrooge or George Bailey realizing he’s had a wonderful life.

But safe.

You were one year old.

As you know full well, our adventures were still only beginning.