Few parents are perfect when it comes to tracking their kids

Who among us tried and true parents has not lost track of a child?

For an instant? For a few minutes? For the time it takes our world to turn upside down, inside out? For the time it takes us to plummet into a paralyzing abyss of “Where is he? Where is she?” to an adrenaline-spiked search for the missing little person.

A show of hands, please?

Yes, I thought so. It has happened to a lot of us.

My first child, a careful daughter, did not wander. My second, a towheaded son, had the lust.

And in the wake of the controversy surrounding the child who fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo last weekend, in the wake of critics calling for the heads of the parents whose 3-year-old boy wound up face-to-face with a 420-pound gorilla, in the wake of the sad, but necessary killing of that animal to save the child’s life, well, my husband and I talked about a time when our young son got loose from us.

Mac was 4 years old. We were at the grocery store. Mac stood mesmerized in front of the tank holding the live lobsters. Michael stood next to him, contemplating the crustaceans for dinner. Assuming Michael had his eyes on Mac, I pushed the cart up a nearby aisle in search of who-knows-what. Should we have consulted one another about who was watching Mac? I suppose, but we didn’t, because we thought the other was doing so, and to make a long story short, after five of the most agonizing minutes of our adult lives – racing through the grocery store, up and down the aisles, recruiting stunned customers to help us find Mac, screaming at the store manager to shut the swooshing doors, we found our little boy.

He was in our car in the parking lot. He told us he got tired of being in the store so he went to the car.

I thought I would die; my knees crumpled. A busy parking lot is a long way for a little boy to walk by himself. Anything could have happened. Yes, I hugged Mac. But then I wanted to shake his teeth out. And I wanted to give Michael the business. I wanted to place blame.

But the truth is, what happened was an accident. An unintentional happenstance that thankfully, gratefully, ended without injury or real loss.

And while the jury is out on whether the parents of the 4-year-old that fell into the gorilla enclosure are culpable – the cops are investigating them, social media is a storm of judgmental types who blame them for losing sight of the child, for the death of the gorilla – I had a brief chat with Satch Krantz, president and CEO of Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia.

The zoo – including more than 100 acres of property and some 2,000 animals – is open every day of the year except Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And every day, Krantz said, children get separated from their parents. Lost.

“It happens every day, multiple times a day,” he said. “It’s a common event.”

Krantz said a child is typically “lost” for about three minutes and is usually found “within eyesight of the parents.”

He said the zoo has an established protocol for finding lost children and a child has never wound up in an animal enclosure.

Well thank God for that.

And pray that those standing in such harsh judgment of a set of parents who are likely still weak-kneed from the events of the past weekend will forevermore have a perfect record when it comes to keeping up with their children.

Otherwise, they may be to blame for something they never saw coming their way, something called an accident.

This story was originally published June 1, 2016 at 2:51 PM.