I Forgave My Son For Stealing $300 And Now He Rules
Or how my thieving teenage son turned into an trustworthy ice cream lover
Or how my thieving teenage son turned into a trustworthy ice cream lover
“Dad, I’m sorry to bother you, but I ate your ice cream,” my soon-to-be-15-year-old son tells me over the phone.
“My ice cream?”
“Yeah, the one that was in the freezer.”
Which one?
“Um, yeah, that’s okay,” I say, “by the way, what flavor was it?”
“Vanilla. A cone.”
“Gotcha. Funny I don’t remember buying that. Probably bought it for you.”
He laughs.
I’m about to hang up when he says, “Can you buy me another one on the way home?”
Smart kid. Knows me too well.
“We’ll see.”
Seems like a normal enough conversation, no big deal, right?
That’s where you’re wrong. It’s a really big deal.
To understand why, I have to take you back to a cold, December evening in 2019.
I’m home from work, and for some reason, I go to the room where I keep my “savings.”
Now, before I go on, it might help you to understand we live in Japan. Why? Because we do money differently here.
We actually still use cash.
Ye Gawds!
But yeah, we use cash and we keep cash around the house.
Oh no, you don’t! I ain’t telling you where we keep it. In fact, sometimes I have forgotten myself! Which brings me back to the tale.
You see, ever since my son was six years old and tried to swap some playing cards from a used toy store and got caught, he’s had issues with stealing things.
Now before you start assuming this has something to do with nurture not nature, well, my daughter’s never had an issue in her life.
And wait just a minute, before you start thinking this means I think she’s better than my son, well, no, that’s just not how I roll.
I believe we all come into this world with certain issues we are meant to work on. My own, which I’ve written about elsewhere, are related to addiction. And being stubborn. And liking cheese. Lots of cheese.
Anyway, stealing was never my thing. Or was it?
Yeah, it actually was.
Over the years, I’ve stolen. It was only really about three years ago that I stopped. Having done so, I believe, is why I feel I have been able to help my son.
Back to that December evening: I’m in the room and I know I have some money in two separate folders because I just saw them the day before and made a note of it on my phone. But they aren’t there.
I search and finally find one of the folders, the bigger one. I count the bills. One is missing. About $100.
Crap. I know what this means. Money doesn’t just fall out of folders, but because six months previous I’d falsely accused my son of taking money, I am going to make absolutely sure I don’t find that bill.
Meanwhile, as I look for it I also look for the other folder. Which I never find. About $200. 30 minutes later, I’m irate. $300 gone.
Now, without going into great detail, our family leads a nice enough life and we really don’t stress about money. I feel blessed about this but also give myself credit for I made one of my life’s goals in my 20s to live more for time than for money.
Still, $300 is a fair amount and, even when my son has taken $5 or $10 dollars, it really sucks.
Because it’s not the loss of the money that matters, it’s the loss of trust.
And I really, really want to trust my son.
I was really mad at him that night. Not only because I knew he did it, but unlike in recent experiences where he’d fessed up quickly, this time he got really mad and went outside and sawed down my microphone tree.
Yes, you read that right. I had a microphone tree. I made it during my annual fall clean-up when I was listening to Axl Rose belt out the Guns n Roses classic “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and wanted to imitate his snake dance. I told my son about the tree that night and he had a good laugh over it. He knows I’m crazy and that’s one reason he loves me.
So when I found the tree sawed down, well, that hurt even more. More trust down the drain.
The next day I was at a meeting with a friend who comes from a very different school of Life than I do. I am a West Coast, a freedom-loving hippie who thinks Bernie Sanders isn’t Left enough; he’s a Southern, freedom-loving redneck who thinks Donald Trump isn’t Right enough.
Yet we are pretty good friends.
Anyway, I was telling him about the experience and how I was promising myself to stay angry at my son longer this time. Too often in the past, I told him, I forgive and forget. But not this time. No way.
He told me that was the right attitude and wished me luck.
There’s something I forgot to mention. Before that meeting that Friday, I had a morning off so I did what I often do in my spare time: I went cycling. The area I live has some great cycling paths along the riversides and on this day, it was actually balmy enough for me to go down to one of those spots to enjoy a brunch before the meeting.
While I was there, I did another thing I often do: I spoke my thoughts into my phone. And started to feel really sad because I realized that all these years my son had been stealing things, so had I.
But, like him, I’d justified it. You see, I was taking money out of my wife’s money stash, which was considerably larger than mine and which she seemed to have a lot of. I always told myself it was the family’s money so it was okay, all the while knowing that if that was true, why didn’t I just ask her for it?
So that day next to the river, I fessed up to myself. It was wrong of me to do it. I asked some friends if I should just admit it to her, just come clean. They all advised against it because it was water under the bridge.
Being somewhat of a contrarian, I resolved to ignore them and tell her and then biked to the meeting.
Due to our schedules, I was mostly able to avoid my son until the wee hours of Sunday morning. You see, my son usually stays up all night playing video games so the best time for me to have a heart-to-heart with him is usually between 3–6 a.m.
I sleep odd hours so often am up then and that was the case this Sunday. It didn’t take me very long to realize I needed to go talk to him.
Now, the funny thing is, I can’t really remember the details of how things went down well enough to share them here. It always amazes me that memoirists can so clearly recall emotional memories from long ago in such detail, because for me, the more emotional an encounter is, the less I remember said details.
All I can tell you is the results.
I believe the very fact I went down there and started talking to him without being angry was what got things going on the right foot. For my son will usually respond to anger with even more anger, which means if I’d started that way, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
Here’s what happened: I forgave him. Not only that, I told him he could keep the money. That it would be his Christmas money.
However, after I told him this, I told him what the real issue was: the loss of trust.
I told him that I was the kind of father who, if he made a decent case to me why he needed money, would do what I could to help him. But what I couldn’t do was have him violate my trust and continually forgive him.
I stopped myself from crying (not easy for me) because I needed him to see I was firm about this, but also because in Japanese culture a crying man is not seen as being worthy of respect (in general).
Still, I showed him my heart.
And you know what, him calling about that ice cream at the start of this, well, that’s about the 20th time he’s done such a thing since that December weekend.
Usually, he’ll ask beforehand. Like the time in January I was biking home in the cold rain and he called. I felt upset at whoever it was for calling because it’s hard to stop, take off my gloves and answer, but when I saw it was him, I responded.
He needed 50 cents and asked if he could use some that was on my desk. Absolutely!
The funny thing is, until writing this, I’ve never told anyone about how we solved the problem of my son stealing from me. I felt like I might get negative feedback.
Maybe I wanted to see if it worked, see if he would steal from me again.
But he hasn’t. And I really doubt he will. Oh, sure, he’ll still get mad at me, slam the door, and ride the usual emotional roller coasters that teenagers ride.
That’s all fine. I’m an every-situation-is-an-opportunity-for-growth kind of guy. And I think this story exemplifies how that philosophy works.
Because you know what: while it wasn’t my intention, by forgiving my son and talking to him about the importance of trust, I was able to forgive myself, too.
I was also able to realize my friends were right; that that money was long gone and it would only open wounds with my wife when we’ve already got enough wounds to heal. That it would be more about me unloading my guilt onto her. So it was best for me to process it, and then turn it into something I could use to forgive my son.
Life is truly mysterious and transformational in the way it is interconnected.
In closing, I’ve been wary of doing much writing in terms of Life Lessons. Or advice. Because I know I have a way of doing things that can be rather odd to people.
But as I sat down to write about Super Tuesday, something told me to save the political post for later and tell this tale. Just write it from the heart, publish it and let it be.
And so it is written. So it be done!
Thanks for reading! You can support me simply by sharing my stuff, or contacting me via Twitter. Also, check out my podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast or read my 2015 novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.”