Adventures in parenting, winter edition: Why is one glove always missing?

Recently, in a Japanese kindergarten class, an alarming number of children’s shoes went missing. The Washington Post reported that 15 shoes were found scattered around the school grounds. After police set up surveillance cameras, they discovered a weasel was the culprit, which was a delightful surprise for the police, teachers, parents and children alike.
The story has made me wonder if there’s possibly a weasel at my kid’s school. Because we’re missing at least 15 different winter-wear items that have gone to school on my children and never made it home.
I know we own an appropriate number of shoes, coats, gloves and hats to keep my kids bundled and cozy on their journey to and from school. I know we have an abundance of those items, actually, since I purchased them. But I have no idea where they all went.
There are a lot of things I thought I knew before becoming a parent. I thought I knew how to take a child to a restaurant and not create a mess equivalent to the destruction of a major hurricane. I thought I knew how to keep a carpet lego-free. I thought I knew how to keep track of gloves, scarves, hats, coats and boots because how hard could that possibly be?
I’ve been humbled on every count since actually becoming a parent, but especially the last. By my estimation, my family is currently missing: two winter coats, four beanies, five gloves (all from different sets), one boot and approximately 5,000 socks. Pre-parent me would be absolutely appalled by this failure of organization.
But what pre-parent me didn’t know is that kid stuff gets swallowed up into a vortex of misplacement despite a parent’s best efforts to keep track of it all. Items that are on the body of a child when they arrive at school or at the park or on a playdate often do not make it home. Instead they exist in a sort of undiscoverable liminal space between our world and another dimension. Like the Bermuda Triangle. Or, maybe, a weasel.
I find a bit of comfort in knowing it’s not just my kids’ stuff that disappears into the void. Earlier this week, the administration at my child’s elementary school sent an email with a photo attached. The subject line read: “Lost and Found.” The email stated that the lost and found is overflowing and that the misplaced items needed to be claimed or they would be given to charity in a week. The photo displayed a coatrack and shelves bursting with sweatshirts, coats, one of many pairs of gloves, various water bottles, a football, a bunch of lunch containers and a belt.
This was the second-funniest email I’ve received from the school this year.
The funniest email came from my 5-year-old’s kindergarten teacher a couple of weeks into the school year. Attached was a photo of a T-shirt with a baseball graphic printed on the front. A child had left the shirt in the classroom, the teacher explained. My greatest wish is that the parent of that child had sent a reply-all, detailing the conversation they had with their child when they arrived home shirtless. Because I’m sure it would sound exactly like the conversations I’ve had with my own children. Like the one I had with my youngest in which I asked, not without exasperation, “What do you mean you don’t know where your other shoe is?”
After searching for hours, I found the shoe in a toy toolbox alongside a comic book.
I had another such conversation with the same child this morning. I told him to please check the lost and found for a missing coat. To which he responded, “I can’t. I’ll be too busy learning.”
I guess that kind of helps to explain this phenomenon. To my son, it feels impossible for him to learn to read and write and add and subtract and play nice at recess and eat his lunch AND keep track of a coat and hat and gloves on top of everything else. There’s no room for it all in his brain, just like there’s no room for one more Elsa thermos in the lost and found.
At school, my kindergartner is learning how to read and write and how to be a person that can return home from school with the coat he traveled there in. And just like learning to read and write, it’s going to take some time.
After being missing for a week, his winter coat reappeared yesterday. “You found your coat!” I exclaimed, when he wore it home.
“What?” he responded.
“Your missing coat,” I said.
“Oh. My teacher found it,” he said, a little annoyed that we were having a conversation about something so unimportant.
He did not elaborate on when or where she found it. Maybe a weasel placed it somewhere on the school grounds. But more likely, a 5-year-old’s brain is to blame for leaving it in some obscure corner of the classroom. Probably in the toy toolbox.