The “Mum Code”

It might have been a year ago, or maybe two (?), that a friend of mine posted about a missing girl on Facebook. She was in a bright yellow Volkswagen, a little VW beetle, and should have been on her way home from somewhere in Northern BC. I don’t remember the details, but I remember that my friend had posted a picture of the car and asked for prayer. And I had been praying fervently that she be found quickly and safely.

The next day I decided to take the scenic route to work and as I drove past an old, abandoned farmhouse, there parked out on the road, near the gate, was a bright yellow cheery little Volkswagen Beetle. I drove past it without thinking and then suddenly a picture of the missing girl and her car floated into my mind. No one had lived in the abandoned farmhouse for years! Why was there a bright yellow beetle now??? What are the odds of that being a coincidence? And that bright yellow wasn’t really a common color now, was it? (I’ve seen hundreds since, but that’s another story. 🙂 )

“Okay Ruth. Stop it!” said my mind. “You always do this. You are simply worrying about somebody’s child. Just pray and trust. Get to work, email your friend and find out if the girl and her car has been found.” For by then, I was halfway to my workplace. But there was this niggling voice in my head. “What if that was the car of the girl? What if…? What if…?” There was a worried mother somewhere who would want me to turn around anyway. And at that thought, I pulled up by the side of the road and turned the car around.

As I drove slowly onto the farmhouse road, every episode of Mentalist and Monk went through my head. With a fast-beating heart, I pulled out my phone (what kind of a Mentalist/Monk super fan would I be if I didn’t have evidence, right??) and slowly drove past, taking a video of the car and the number plate.

I must have broken every speed limit that day to get to work (a whole hour late), heart thumping and weak-kneed, and pulled up my friend’s Facebook page to check out the number plate (before I alerted my friend and 911, that is), when I saw her update that both the girl and her car had been found! Oh my!! That was an anticlimax  – but a truly happy one – though it took me a few minutes to get my heartbeat back to normal, get off my adrenaline high, and get on with the tasks of my day.

That evening I was telling my daughter about the whole morning’s drama, when she laughingly said, “Mum, you’re soooo dramatic! I can’t believe you turned the car around and then took a video! Why???”

And as I reminisced about my day before bed that night, I wondered why I had turned the car around. Was it my overactive imagination? Maybe I needed to cut down on TV dramas? And that’s when I remembered an incident that happened when my kids were little. I was with all three of them in a large busy store when suddenly I heard my child’s voice saying, “Mama!” It sounded desperate. I swung around quickly, scanning the crowds for her, saying, ”Yes darling. I’m here”, when I realized that 3 other mothers had responded to that call too. Four mothers – four different nationalities and languages – but all four responded instantly to a child in need. We all laughed at our common urgent response and went our separate ways.

My turning the car around for a missing child was not due to too many TV dramas or my being overly dramatic [well, maybe a little? 😉 ], and I would do it again in a heartbeat! You see, it simply is the universal “Mum Code”.