I think it's easy to come across as holier than thou when critiquing the McCann's actions. I have made plenty of mistakes as a parent, and as much as I do my best to learn from them I will make more again in the future. That is true of virtually every parent, to varying degrees. Fortunately, for most us of those mistakes end up being trivial rather than life changing.
We've 'lost' our son on a few occasions. The first time, he was little older than two. My missus was at home with him, waiting for her dad to pay them a visit. She was taking some washing upstairs, and simply said to him "you stand there and look out for granddad". When she came down stairs there was absolutely no sign of him. I received a phone call from her at work, and she was unintelligible (more so than usual even) - just crying and screaming down the phone. I'd never known her so upset in all the time I've known her, and believe me, I've upset her once or twice along the way.
After about 15 minutes of searching, a neighbour found him wandering in the road round the corner from our house. He'd taken "look out for granddad" as an instruction to go looking for him, and quietly slipped out of the door. She was only upstairs for a minute and boom, he'd vanished. That could have ended badly, fortunately it didn't.
It happened again on his sixth birthday last year. All the family had gone bowling, and he wanted to show my mum something near the arcade area. Instead of walking sensibly with her, he shot off and my dear old mum, in her 70s, completely lost sight of him. We spent nearly an hour searching for him. You very quickly go from a fairly casual "well, he can't have gone very far" to genuinely fearing something terrible might have happened. With every minute that goes by, that feeling gets worse.
As I say, after almost an hour, by this point everyone visibly stressed and panicked (not least my mum), he miraculously reappeared. The little bugger had been hiding in the disabled toilet, for nothing other than shits and giggles. He knew he was safe all along, so what's the problem? He couldn't quite comprehend the fact that we didn't.
It's the thought of not knowing whether that feeling is going to last for another five minutes, or the rest of your life. I can only imagine the horror the McCann's must have felt when they returned to find Madeleine's room empty, followed the the increasing feeling that with every minute, hour, day, week that passed, the situation was less-and-less likely to have a happy ending. As a parent, I can totally sympathise with them on that.
Maybe I, and in fact all of us, owe a degree of our own risk aversion as parents to the events of that night; a cruel case study as to what can go wrong if you take too big a gamble with your kids' safety, no matter how good the odds look on paper. But that's ultimately what they did; they rolled the dice and paid an incomprehensible price for their patatas bravas.
What an excellent and searingly honest post.
When my daughter was 2 (she's nearly 11 now) we were in the Sealife Centre at Great Yarmouth (don't ask me what the **** we were doing in that shithole of a resort; ask my ex. She booked it). Anyway, we ended up in the gift shop and I was pushing our 6 month old son in his buggy. After a bit my ex came up to me and asked where Florence was. I said "I thought she was with you?" and you can guess the rest. My blood ran cold. She'd only been out of our sight for a moment. I'm not sure how long we were looking for her - maybe just a few minutes but it felt like a lifetime and I was shouting at the shop assistants to lock the doors FFS.
In the end we found her hiding amongst a rail of Sealife Centre hoodies (£39.99. Can you believe that?) thinking she was having a great game.
Parenting, eh? The longest five minutes of my life and the feeling will never leave me.