I awoke on Monday morning in a ridiculously good mood.

I slept well, my boys slept well, the sun was shining and I just had the feeling that all was right with the world. Then I looked down at my hand and my mood instantly crashed.

My wedding ring was gone.

I don’t wear much jewelry, in fact, other than a simple chain with a Star of David and my son Ben’s birthstone around my neck, my wedding band and engagement ring are the only pieces I ever have on. I don’t wear earrings, bracelets — I don’t even have a watch.

I’m also not in the habit of removing them. Cooking, cleaning, washing my hands, whatever — I don’t take off my rings. They’re just a part of me, which makes it worse because I don’t know when it was that I lost them.

After I had my last baby, Sam, I lost the pregnancy weight very quickly. And then thanks to a little help from an overactive thyroid, it kept coming off. In just a few months I was weighing less than I had been even before I got pregnant. Which was great, don’t get me wrong, but apparently when you lose weight it’s not just your waist that gets smaller. Your fingers do too.

I had noticed that my rings were loose. I even bought one of those little plastic spacer thingies to keep them from accidentally being flung across the room until I could have them re-sized. What I should have done was put them away in a safe place and not trusted the symbols of my marriage to a 99 cent piece of plastic.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Maybe my 4-year-old spied them and stashed them away in his toy box with all of his other “treasures.” Maybe my 7-month-old ate them. Maybe they went down the kitchen sink. Or, maybe they’re sitting at eye level on a flat surface in plain view and I just keep overlooking them.

I don’t know. I do know that I’ve torn the house apart twice now in search of them, to no avail. Haystack, needles … You know the saying.

Am I any less married because I don’t have my ring on? Of course not. But every time I happen to glance down at my naked finger I get a pang in my chest.

They aren’t particularly valuable in a monetary sense, but to me, they’re priceless.

Part of me says calm down Kasie, it’s just a ring. But it’s a very small part. And when my husband offered to replace them, I responded very maturely by whining “but I don’t want a new ring, I want my ring.”

In truth, I’m holding out hope they will be found in the house somewhere; that I took them off to perform some task and for some reason have no recollection of doing so. I also have a bad habit of putting important things in a “safe place,” so safe, that I myself have a hard time finding them later.

The optimist in me says they’ll turn up in the house, probably when I least expect it. The pessimist says they’re gone. The realist says I’ll find them in a dirty diaper or in the kitchen sink drain trap (which I’m planning on dismantling as soon as I get home).

Fingers crossed.

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Strickly Speaking

Kasie Strickland

Kasie Strickland is a staff writer for The Easley Progress, The Pickens Sentinel and Powdersville Post and can be reached at kstrickland@civitasmedia.com. Views expressed in this column are those of the writer only and do not represent the newspaper’s opinion.