CoAbode

'Nice Girls Can Be Naughty': A series of articles, By Erica Miner
Excerpted From Erica's Novel, Travels With My Lovers:

By mid-afternoon Florence had become, to my overloaded senses, a bewildering maze of crisscrossing streets and piazzas choked with tourists. Then, when the kids and I had finally got our bearings (I was feeling calm and we were on our way to a bar to reward ourselves with some gelati) the unimaginable happened. My son, who had insisted on chasing pigeons through the Piazza della Signoria, disappeared; and suddenly the phrase "sightseeing" took on a whole new - and frightening - meaning.

Julian was only eight - what made him think he could just take off like that, in the middle of an unfamiliar, foreign city? One minute he was alternately pursuing the ubiquitous birds and fidgeting impatiently while five-year-old Regina and I admired the imposing statues in the colonnade; and the next minute he was out of sight. Something was definitely going on with him.

*************************************************************

Personal Narrative By Erica Miner:

"This is every mom's nightmare, single or otherwise. To add to my distress and guilt over wanting some much-needed time for myself, now I had to deal with my terror over what might have happened to my son. He had always had a mind of his own (how many of us have recognized this in our own progeny?) But he was my firstborn; and I was impossibly young and didn't have enough mothering experience to know if this kind of behavior was 'normal' for his age or not. I could only speculate that he was either trying to establish his own personality, or that his actions were a sign of something else troubling him. One way or other, the pressure was mounting on this poor beleaguered mom. How many of us can relate to that?"