When my husband lost his wedding ring, my son thought we were no longer married

• My husband lost his wedding ring while raking leaves in our backyard.

• We tried looking for it for months with no success.

• Our middle child thought this meant we weren't married anymore.

One autumn afternoon, while raking leaves, my husband, Rich, lost his wedding ring. When he told us, our sons and I hurried to the backyard to help him hunt for it.

Plain on the outside, the platinum band's interior was engraved with our wedding date and the word "LOVE," a nod to the Nat King Cole classic that played during our first dance at our reception, adding to its sentimental value.

We hoped the ring, possibly lost amid the browning landscape, would be shiny enough to catch our eyes. Yet after an hourlong search, we still couldn't find it.

We looked for it for months

Rich hadn't been wearing gardening gloves and the cool weather made the ring loose on his finger. Maybe the band had fallen into one of the garbage cans he'd filled with leaves and sticks and taken to our local compost center, we'd reasoned.

For months, I checked the newspaper and community forums, optimistically thinking I'd spot a notice, perhaps even a photo, alerting me that someone had found the ring in the free mulch offered by the compost center.

By spring, when it still hadn't resurfaced, Rich considered renting a metal detector and combing through the brush where he'd been raking when he first noticed it missing. Before the forsythia and azaleas bloomed, we searched again without any luck. Because we weren't ready to give up hope, we didn't replace the ring.

Our son thought we had split

We'd been married for a decade by that point, and while it was odd to see my husband's ring finger bare after all that time, I didn't really give it much thought. Some people have strong feelings about their spouse wearing their ring as a symbol of their commitment, but it didn't phase me. We've all read those studies that state that wedding rings make men more attractive, and then, just as quickly, we've seen those findings debunked.

When celebrities are spotted without their wedding rings, it typically sparks speculation about the state of their union. But while Rich and I didn't dwell on the absence of the ring beyond hoping we'd find it, someone else in the family had a very different interpretation of the situation.

Our middle son, Ben, a kindergartener at the time, and I were standing in the kitchen baking together months after the ring disappeared. Wistfully, he looked out the back door toward the spot where we'd hunted for my husband's wedding band.

"It's too bad Dad can't find his ring," Ben said. "He's a nice guy, and somebody should want to marry him."

Stunned, I stopped stirring our muffin mix. "Oh, Ben, Dad and I are still married," I assured him, wondering how long he'd been thinking his parents were no longer together and why he hadn't said anything.

"Really?" Our son shook his head. "But he doesn't have a ring."

Since toddlerhood, Ben had been making wild inferences. If we mistakenly walked down the pet food aisle at the grocery store, he thought we were adopting a dog. If I wore a dress or heels, he ran to the window expecting to see his favorite babysitter approaching. Should I have anticipated his confusion and explained that we were still married?

How often do we hear those clichés: "Little pitchers have big ears" and "Children are like sponges," and yet we never had a clue that our son had interpreted the lost ring as the dissolution of our marriage.

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