The other day I had the misfortune to be home when someone I really didn’t want to see came over to my house—not just came over, mind you, but actually came inside. Now, as as any rational, well-adjusted adult will tell you, the only thing to do when confronted with a situation like that is to calmly, firmly, and politely tell the interloper that their presence is not wanted. It is, after all, the mature thing to do. Which is probably why I jumped out the window.
It’s not as bad as it sounds: my house is only one story. But the side of the house I jumped out of is the side that is squished up against my neighbor’s house, and it is the side where we both have tried to rectify this lack of privacy by planting lots and lots of lilac bushes: so many lilac bushes, in fact, that while it is very private, it is also a rather impenetrable jungle—impenetrable, that is, unless you happen to jump out a window.
Which I did.
Since the window was rather large (that’s how I fit), once I was outside I thought that the best thing to do would be to get out of sight, because, really, the only thing that could possibly be more embarrassing than jumping out a window to avoid someone is getting caught jumping out a window to avoid someone. And so that is how it was that I came to be crawling along the side of my house, leaving clumps of hair and pieces of skin in the lilac bushes, and it is also how it came to be that I eventually arrived at the small spaces underneath my children’s windows, where I discovered, to my chagrin, that I have been falsely accusing them for over a year now. I have been accusing them of losing all of my dishes, but, as it turns out, they hadn’t lost them at all: they had just thrown them out of their windows.
Suddenly I understood the frantic sounds I had heard behind closed doors every time I threatened to come in for a surprise room inspection. “I’m coming in,” I would warn, “and there better not be any dishes in there.” When I would burst in I would always find them sitting on their beds, the pictures of innocence, not a dish in sight. I now realize, of course, that it was actually the picture of deviousness. Unfortunately, however, for both of our sakes, it was not really the kind of deviousness that is very clever.
Because, if it had been the clever kind of deviousness then than they would have gone outside and picked up the evidence at least once in the past year—if not to bring them in and wash them then at least to throw them away. (Preferably somewhere I wouldn’t find them; a strategy they might also consider using when trying to hide other kinds of evidence. Here’s a hint, for any of you that may be needing to hide something in the near future: the very top of the garbage can is not the best of hiding places—especially when the person you are trying to hide the object from is also the one who takes out the trash.)
The funny thing, though, is that while it is true that I was not at all pleased to find a pile of my dishes outside of their windows, I was also a little impressed: throwing the dishes out the window definitely implies a certain level of “outside of the box”—or rather, window—thinking. And isn’t that exactly the kind of problem solving we want our kids to develop?
And, after all, it could have been worse: at least when they got an unwanted visitor they threw something out of their windows besides themselves.