BY LAURIE HLAVATY
PoughkeepsieJournal

As I slip 50 cents into the kiddie car outside the store to let my preschooler take a rare, much anticipated, ride, an automated message says: Parents, don’t leave your child unattended.

Immediately, the face of the Kansas teen kidnapped and killed days before comes back to me.

“Don’t leave your child unattended.”

If only it were that easy.

The killing of 18-year-old Kelsey Smith was covered extensively this week on TV.

Predictably, stories about missing children disturb me - but this one more so than others.

I think it’s because hers was a young life taken - not in an accident or through an illness - but on purpose as she was on the precipice of adulthood, at a moment of pure hope, joy, promise.

As a new high school graduate, she was likely both looking back at where she had been and looking ahead.

She was enrolled at college and wanted to be a veterinarian, her father said.

She was out shopping for a gift before heading to a graduation party when she was abducted in a parking lot, allegedly by a 26-year-old married father.

In the family photographs shown of her over and over again, the hope and excitement are almost palpable.

But then, terror for her and grief for family.

I watched her stoic parents speak, and I could hear the irreparable fissures in their hearts.

I ached for them and thought of my own kids - as tragedies like this make me do.

We do everything we can to keep them safe, but we can only do so much.

My preschooler is particularly slippery. Turn my back for a minute and she is leaving our small yard, down the driveway, on bike or on foot, and down the sidewalk.

I feel as if I am always yelling at her to come back - when, honestly, I want her and her sister to know more freedom - the kind I knew as a child.

But through our 24-hour news culture, we know too much, and even though the incidents are statistically rare, it only has to happen once - to anyone’s child.

So we watch our kids. Constantly. With vigilance.

Yet, this horrible story, and others like it, remind us there is only so much we can control.

On the morning I first heard about Kelsey Smith, when she was still missing and her family, friends and community were moving through a sea of faith, there were segments on the same morning show about navigation systems to keep track of teen drivers and about how kids are injuring themselves on those popular Heely sneakers, the ones with wheels.

With kids, there are always worries - from the small to the heart-wrenchingly huge.

And you can do everything to try to balance the dangers: watch them on that kiddie ride, hold their hand in the parking lot, make sure they don’t leave the yard without you. For now.

You can usher them through childhood safely, right up to the threshold of adulthood - but you can’t hold them forever.

Or keep them safe.

That is a parent’s harshest reality.

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