Stealing

 When I was a kid, I wanted to be an adult. And when I was a kid, being an adult meant having money. 

Unlike some other kids, I didn’t receive an allowance from my parents. Instead, when I wanted or needed money, I had to ask my parents. My parents controlled all of the money in our house. So, in my small mind, money and adulthood were inextricably tangled. 

Imagine my excitement when I found an old, magenta-striped wallet in the garage. You can guess my thought process: adult = money, money = wallet. And now, I had a wallet…which I proceeded to carry around with me everywhere.  

I wasn’t satisfied for long. Carrying that old, grimy little wallet around with me for a couple of days made me feel like an adult for a little while. But what is a wallet without money? That’s right, I wanted a real adult wallet, filled to the point of bursting with important adult things like money, cards, IDs, business cards -- whatever they kept in there, I wanted it. 

I knew exactly where to find objects to put into my wallet.

So, one afternoon, with my wallet in hand, I wandered into my parents’ room. And lo’ and behold, lying out on the table was a twenty-dollar bill. Without a second thought, I grabbed the twenty-dollar bill and slipped it into the magenta-colored pocket of my wallet.

It fit perfectly, by the way. Of course it did.

I remember staring at the measly little bill that now sat inside of my wallet. I didn’t feel the satisfaction I’d hoped to feel -- the problem, I thought, must be that there aren’t enough bills. So I did the next logical thing to do: I began searching around my parents’ room for money.

That’s how my mom found me around fifteen minutes later, sitting on the floor of her closet and rummaging through boxes, the old wallet open and lying by my side with a twenty-dollar bill and a couple of folded index cards haphazardly stuck inside.

I don’t know what she must have thought at that moment. There was her little girl sitting on the floor of her closet, looking innocently up at her with a stolen bill by her side. I remember my mom’s incredulous expression as she looked at me and called my dad over -- “Look, there’s the twenty-dollar bill you left on the table!” -- and I looked up at her, not entirely comprehending her expression of surprise.

I didn’t realize it at the moment, as my child-sized brain had completely fixated on filling the wallet up with whatever I could find, but what I did was technically stealing. I think my parents realized my non-malicious intent (hence, no memory of extreme punishment, thankfully), but my actions were wrong in the sense that stealing is bad. 

Should I have been punished for the theft I didn’t mean to commit? My parents didn’t think so, at least not very harshly. All I got was a scolding that left me suddenly aware of what I had done. For me, that scolding was enough to teach me my lesson -- once I realized I had done something bad, I felt guilty and made up my mind to never do it again. Honestly (though I might be a little biased, considering it's punishment for me I’m talking about), I think just the scolding was sufficient -- I was able to understand my wrongdoing without having to suffer through a harsh punishment. A win-win situation in my book. 

To this day, I have never taken money from my parents without asking for it first. It helps that they always give it to me -- I think they’ve come to trust me more now that I’m in high school. But that just goes to show that sometimes, it's better to guide a child with words in contrast to punishment.