I am not your friend.
It started with prepping for a Zoom class. That was when I noticed my laptop wasn’t where I thought I’d left it.
The dogs were at their puppy daycare. The kids were in school. The house was quiet. I could hold a thought for more than 5 seconds, and I took that as a good sign to get writing work done.
I need the internet, quiet, a notebook, and a computer. I set the “spa radio” mixes I’ve compiled on my phone as background noise and got to work.
My writing groups are based out of California, and I’ll repeat something I’ve said before: the only good thing about Covid is the writing groups I’ve become a part of from California.
My Zoom class was at 2 p.m. and I wanted to get some writing edits and work done in the morning before it started.
I check my impromptu “mobile office” bag as I sit at the dining room table. This week the bag is a reusable canvas tote that reads “Good Vibes Only,” and the straps are strung over the corner of the chair to prevent it from sliding off the chair in the middle of the night.
My laptop isn’t in its padded zippered bag. Weird. Damn kids, I think as I look around. I blame them but I know I might have misplaced it. My short-term memory is shot with the needs of everyone and everything vying for attention in the house.
Maybe it’s a kid’s bed- they’d never taken my laptop into their rooms, just tried to log in when it was left on the dining room table, but they had both been up and in each other’s rooms over and over since 5:30 a.m. this morning. Our house rule is you can be up before 7 a.m. but you have to stay in your own bedroom. They each have books and toys. Paige has a large clear box of assorted rocks from the mining store in town and a bed full of stuffed animals. Charlotte has her comic books and Star Wars books.
The laptop isn’t in their beds. I check twice and even pull the sheets and blankets back.
It wasn’t left on the couch or the ottoman from a late-night meeting the night before.
It wasn’t plugged in on my office desk nestled in the corner room of my basement.
My laptop isn’t anywhere in the house.
Fine, I’ll do other things, and maybe I’ll find it that way. The whole “stop looking for something and you’ll find it.” I’ll ask Charlotte about it when she comes home. It doesn’t occur to me to ask Paige, she isn’t the one who loves to get into mom’s things (yet, I know her time is coming. Her name doesn’t mean “assistant” by accident.).
I will also ask for the container of mints missing from my car. I know Charlotte took those because A) she’s done it before, and B) she was in the car with me this morning because she had a doctor’s appointment instead of taking the bus to school. The mints were there when we got into the car and not when I dropped her off at school after the appointment.
Have I mentioned Charlotte has just turned seven years old?
So I can’t attend my Zoom class (I dislike using Zoom on my phone), and text to my mentor telling her my laptop was missing.
Fast forward to 4 p.m. when the kids come home on the bus.
“Okay, both of you,” I say to the girls as they stand by the back of the couch in our entryway, backpacks at their feet. I cross my arms over my chest, trying to give an “I mean business” stance.
“First. Charlotte- mints.” I hold out my hand. With a heavy exaggerated sigh, she brings the container out of her backpack and slaps it (with an added eye roll) into my palm. I let the eye roll slide and count my silent blessings: the container isn’t empty because, usually, it’s empty when she gives it back.
“Now, where is my laptop?” The two of them look at their socked feet, Paige with her hands behind her back and Charlotte barely containing her usual manic after-school energy, bouncing on her toes.
Charlotte shakes her head. “I don’t know!”
I look at Paige.
“I don’t know!” she parrots, leaning against the back of the couch.
I look back at Charlotte. “Tell me.”
She stomps her foot and balls her fists, starting to spin/sway with her words. “I don’t know!”
She doesn’t know I know this, but this is her “tell.” Her immediate defensiveness shows me that she knows something even if she doesn’t know what answer to give.
“Calm down. I’m asking. Where is my laptop?”
“I don’t know!” Charlotte defends again. She moves towards the space between the arms of the armchair and our couch like she’s going to roll back over the couch arm. I look at Paige, and before I can ask again she points a finger down to Charlotte’s backpack.
“Ugh, PAIGE!” Charlotte whines/yells. She stomps to her backpack and rips it open, and brings out my silver laptop with colorful motivational stickers on the top: “Never forget how wildly capable you are,” “Making the best of this mess,” and “H2Ohhhhh Yeah.” The multi-hundred dollar piece of equipment I need for WORK.
The kids don’t see me play games on my laptop, I’m always working on my writing with it. It is for WORK- all my writing and edits and notes are on that silver computer. While it’s backed up on an external hard drive, I can’t log into the hard drive without my computer.
And it was in my seven-year-old’s backpack. The backpack with an inch-thick cushioning layer of cracker crumbs along the bottom every time I empty it on the weekend. The backpack with now-solid chewed gum in the pockets. The backpack I plan to set on fire the day after school ends, but I refuse to get her a new one until then.
My mind is blank. Not even crisis mode or survival mode kicks in. I just stare at my children. I have no idea how to parent in this situation.
I review the facts, unable to process anything else. Not only did Charlotte go into my office bag, get the laptop, and put the laptop case back in the bag, she took it to school, along with the mint container from my car, and tried to log on with her friends on the bus on the ride home, AND LIED TO MY FACE ABOUT IT. It’s the premeditation that I can’t understand, I never did that when I was a kid… I think. I try to remember as I pick off the raisin stuck to my computer, dangerously close to the USB port.
“Go to your room,” I tell Charlotte, pointing to the three steps that lead to the main ranch-style house. “Go play in the family room,” I tell Paige, pointing to the same steps but with a less forceful hand. I need them both gone. I need a moment to process it.
With a loud “UGH! I HATE this place!” Charlotte yells as she stomps away, fists balled at her sides.
There is too much happening in one moment. I can’t hold space for any of the feelings around this. She will have to be punished. But I have no idea even where to begin. I’m a child of the 80s, and for the first time, I wish spanking was still allowed.
I’m hurt that she lied again.
I’m mad she took my computer when last year she lost my wedding rings at daycare (I’ll explain later) and I thought had learned her lesson about how hurt I was by that.
I’m stunned at the level of planning that went into sneaking it to school. And I’m stunned at her audacity in taking my computer to school. I was with her all morning. She was with me for hours and carried the backpack around the whole time. I didn’t suspect and she never told me. Hours!
I don’t spank my kids. A swat on the butt, maybe, but not the repeated spankings I know from my childhood. “Time out” doesn’t work in our house anymore, since I suck at it. We had our “time-out space” at the end of the hallway for the last 3 years, but now they’re too big to stay in the spot. I have to watch them out of the corner of my eye, put them back in the space over and over, and restart the timer… it’s just too stressful for me. Instead of a timeout space, they get sent to their room. Go child, go express your discontent somewhere that’s not in my immediate bandwidth.
Charlotte stomped up the stairs with Paige dallying behind at her favorite snail’s pace, and I pulled my hands down over my face like an invisible washcloth. Trying to pull myself together to deal with what had just happened. But no idea where to begin.
And so began the hour-long tantrum by Charlotte starting at 4:15 p.m., when she discovered was “seriously grounded” until Friday (today was Monday). Not just canceled karate classes that she loved, but also no media (gamer, TV, or tablet). She slammed her door. I heard things (walls or her door) being punched or kicked. She ripped down the glittery karate-themed birthday garland over her door. She threw the floppy monster doll I made her for her birthday out into the hall. I let her out of her room long enough to get it out of the hallway. She yelled the entire time, screams and cries that were more noise than words. I sat on the back porch watching Paige play in the shaded play area her Grampa (Bob’s dad) had built for the girls last year. I could hear Charlotte’s rage all the way outside.
At least I know where she is, I think as I sit in an Adirondack chair made by my own Grampa, who died two weeks before Charlotte was born.
Paige is now content on her favorite swing so I walk back into the house to try and talk to Charlotte.
Charlotte is curled on the stairs to her elevated bed as I stand in the doorway.
“You’re hurting my feelings!” she yells as she sobs into her knees before I say anything.
“My feelings are hurt too, why did you take my laptop to school?” I ask. She doesn’t give an answer. “Remember what happened last year when you lost my wedding rings?”
On April 21, 2021, two years after Bob died, I went to put on my wedding rings after I got dressed. I had stopped wearing mine and Bob’s regularly during the beginning of Covid. With the hand washing and copious use of hand sanitizer, they had irritated my fingers more than given me comfort. I would wear them sometimes, feeling and hearing them click together as I crocheted or typed. They lived on a small ring holder on my dresser next to Bob’s urn. The ring holder was a white porcelain bowl with a gold-plated stag head in the middle to hang jewelry off the horns. A joke between Bob and me — the gold deer bust was the closest I would get to hunting with him every fall.
But my engagement/wedding ring combo wasn’t on any of the horns. I moved items on the dresser, thinking they had fallen off. Not on my dresser. Don’t panic, I told myself, we will find them.
I checked the floor and looked under the dresser with the assistance of my cell phone’s flashlight feature. Not on the floor. I pulled the dresser away from the wall and didn’t see them on the floor behind. I called Charlotte, then a new 6-year-old, into my room to look behind the dresser for them. She didn’t see them, and neither did I.
“Do you know where mommy’s rings are?” She shook her head. “Charloootte,” I drew her name out, in my best chance to hide my panic and sound in control of my heightened anxiety.
After a five or ten or million minute moment of back and forth “Where is it?” and “I don’t know!” she revealed she had taken them to daycare. By then Kindergarten had resumed full-time, and when I went to put on the rings, she hadn’t been to daycare in a month. A MONTH!
She remembered seeing them on her fingers during lunchtime, she had taken the pretty rings to show her friends, and when lunch was over she had thrown out her food. That was the last time she saw my rings.
I didn’t cry at first– shock took over. I took Paige to daycare after Charlotte was on the bus to school, and explained to the director and the teachers at daycare what had happened. I explained what the rings looked like, panic taking over reason in my brain. Two white gold bands soldered together, my engagement ring on top with a blue diamond and my wedding ring on the bottom with a small row of smaller white diamonds.
The teachers ripped daycare apart looking for those rings. It had been a month. Nothing. I have heard many stories of rings found months or years later, and I let others have hope that would happen for me. But, I had to accept they were lost. Lost because my 6-year-old daughter brought them to daycare to show her friends.
Now, almost exactly a year later, she’s taken my laptop to school. I assume to be like the cool 2nd and 3rd graders who have school-assigned Chrome books.
“Remember how upset I was about the rings you took to daycare last year? And then they were lost?” I ask. Last year, when it was clear the rings were gone, she had come into the kitchen to find me crying, standing by the coffee maker and the microwave, trying to make coffee for the morning. She had come to my hip and hugged me from the side, arms wrapped around my hips. No words, just hugging comfort. And I couldn’t speak words to her, I had none to say.
This year, I have words: “I am really upset you took my computer to school,” I reiterate as she continues crying on her stairs, ”it’s expensive and important.”
“I don’t even CARE!” she screams. “I don’t care about those rings!”
I give myself credit for walking away and letting her tantrum resume.
A few minutes later her refrain morphs into “you don’t even care about me!” over and over again.
I knew Bob for so long that I can guess what he would do in most situations. I’d been able to continue on by myself, knowing what our couple and parent values were. But Charlotte was four when he died. Now she is seven.
I’ve outgrown what we knew as co-parents and here it was on full display. Now I have to figure out what to do on my own. Suggestions could be given by other parents (my sister, my neighbor, my mom), but I alone would decide what Charlotte’s consequence would be. This would not be solved with a toddler time-out.
I was at a loss for this one. What would Bob say?
“There has to be a reason,” I say after Charlotte is in her bed, Paige is asleep, and I’m alone with the dogs in the living room.
“Probably,” Bob says, sitting on the other end of the couch.
“Is it attention?” I ask him.
“Probably,” he repeats.
“But I give her attention.”
“Maybe it’s because of April,” he says with a shrug.
“We were sick all of April. I had Covid and then she had Covid.”
“Well yeah, this year, but what about the other Aprils? My death, her birthday, the rings, now this. She’s starting to put the pieces together.”
“Your kids are too fucking smart for me.”
He grins. “No, our kids are fucking smart and we are too.”
“We were smart together. We aren’t together anymore.”
I stare at the end of the couch, where I can’t see him but I can hear his answers to my questions.
“You’re doing what you promised- you’re raising our girls,” he says.
“I miss you.”
“I know.”
“I wish you were here with me. I’m fucking tired.”
“I’m right here. Where else would I be?” he asks.
How do I teach Charlotte that taking things without permission is wrong, what haven’t I said?
How do I teach Charlotte that lying is wrong, what haven’t I already said?
How do I put that fear into her not to do it again?
I want my kids to have a healthy dose of respect for me. I might have called it “a healthy dose of fear,” like what I have for my parents and in-laws, but I’m an adult now. I don’t want my kids to fear me. I want them to respect what I say and respect what I ask of them. Don’t take mom’s things; you will be punished for it. It’s wrong.
Not being able to watch TV with her sister is devastating in CharlotteWorld. I have added a list of some other “undesirable chores” to do after school instead of watching TV, thanks to a great idea from some parent-friends.
- Pick up sticks from the yard
- Refold all the clothes in your dresser (Their dressers are a mess. They put their clothes away themselves so I let it slide, but they’re a mess.)
- Reorganize kid books so all the titles are showing, possibly have them arranged by size or in alphabetical order by the author (if the child in question can read)
- Dog poop patrol
- Wash the kitchen cupboards
- Dusting the family room, living room, and all the bookshelves
- Sorting Legos by color (this one feels extreme but it makes my desire for an organized house so happy)
- Washing windows
The list has been made and stored in a safe place. Not all these chores were done over the course of the week, but I’d like to think my point was made. She was very happy not to be grounded anymore.
I am a mom. I am a parent. I love you more than anything in the world. But I am not your friend. I am here to teach you how to be a decent adult and a decent human being. Do not take my things to school, or, as Charlotte put it in a letter I made her write about why stealing is wrong, “you will be grounded for 12 weeks.” Five days equals 12 weeks for a 7-year-old. And (though I kept this to myself) it felt like 12 weeks to her overtired 37-year-old mother.
