I've been hearing for the past couple days about a 2-year-old whose grandmother reported her missing, though her mother says the mother knows where that girl is. The mother has led the police on a couple wild goose chases now, and told some lies, and the young girl is still missing from the grandmother's world. Neighbors and friends have not seen this young girl for about five weeks.

I fear for that little girl, Caylee, but I like to imagine the mother actually did something like place the girl for adoption. The father died a year ago, and the mother has had to depend on the grandmother to help take care of the child. It sounds like the grandmother was maybe a bit overbearing, though she seems rather nice--it's just that if I were in that mother's position, I suspect things were maybe a bit more than she could bear. In my idealistic world, I want to think the mother wanted to place the girl for adoption but the grandmother wouldn't allow that--so she felt she needed to leave the family home, go place the girl, then not admit to the placement to her mother or anyone else.

In this situation, the mother would have done nothing illegal except lie to the police--and, in this kind of situation, it would seem that she has some emotional and mental issues that would provide mitigating circumstances should a charge such as "obstruction of justice" be placed when no child can ever be found. There is no requirement that a mother tell anyone where her child might be. There is no legal requirement saying that a mother must tell anyone that a child has been placed for adoption. There is nothing to say that the mother had any legal requirement to publicize the location of her child.

However, I fear for this girl. The police cadaver dog alerted to a dead body in the mother's car. And that scares me. Very much. I pray for this family and the girl, and only God can make sense of it all.