I know that this is a subject I have written about many times before, but since it is also something that keeps coming up over and over again I kind of feel entitled to keep on writing about it. I am referring, of course, to the subject of losers, and how I am surrounded by a whole house full of them.
The people in my house lose everything. Library books, cell phones, homework assignments, swim suits, car keys (theirs and my own), application forms, cell phones, game dice, hair ties, bicycles, ipods, important phone numbers, cell phones, jars of peanut butter, backpacks, shoes, pillows, pens and pencils, video games, lap tops, cell phones, sleeping bags, medication, eyeglasses, hats, jewelry—and did I mention cell phones? My god, they lose the hell out of their cell phones. If I was an environmentalist I would be more concerned about the cadmium pollution from cellphones falling out of teenager’s pockets than I would ever be about the stuff that ends up in landfills from the ones they throw away.
I used to think that they would stop losing things once they got older and started paying for stuff themselves, but, so far at least, that hasn’t been the case—if anything, they lose the stuff they have paid for even more often, possibly because they think I won’t complain about lost stuff I if I wasn’t the one who paid for it. (Not true). What’s worse is that not only do they lose the stuff they have paid for themselves more frequently, but their reaction to the loss is also so much more severe. Where once they were blasé (“Oh, by the way: I lost that iPhone you bought me for Christmas—oh well, I’m sure it will turn up”) now they are frantic, full of blame and accusations. (“What have you done with my iPhone? I left it right here! Tell me where you put it!”).
Another problem with the loser also being the payer is that their personal investment makes them feel entitled to ransack and pillage anything that qualifies as a potential “hiding place;”; this includes, but is not limited to, such places as other people’s underwear drawers, sealed boxes of christmas ornaments in the back of the attic, and their little brother’s toy chest. (And yes, like most ransackers and pillagers, they feel no compulsion to put things back after they are through with the ransacking and pillaging.)
I used to try and help them stem the tide of losing and searching, but to no avail: I put a bowl by the front door to drop keys in, a shelf in the kitchen to charge cellphones and ipods, and dressers in their rooms for clothes, but it didn’t matter: those things weren’t used, and whatever they were intended to safeguard still got lost. And then the frantic whole house search would begin once again.
And this doesn’t just mean that the whole house is searched: this means that the whole house must be involved in the searching—on the one hand to avoid the the twisted accusations of thievery (a fifteen year old girl accusing a forty-four year old man of “stealing” her favorite pink bra is just wrong), and on the other to avoid being run over in the frantic whirlwind of book-tossing and clothes-flinging that passes for “looking” in the teenage world. Or at least passes until you can’t take the destruction anymore and finally get up to look for (and find) the missing object yourself.
Which, come to think about it, is probably the wrong thing to do, because maybe the secret to no longer losing something is not in the paying for it, or even in the looking for it, but rather in the searching for and finding of it.
At least, that’s what I hope.