To Catch a Thief

My name is Anna and I am a kleptomaniac.

'Where,' shouts the Vicar, 'have you put my swimming trunks?'
'Where,' shouts the 8yo, 'have you hidden my school tie?'
'You're dead meat, ' bawls my daughter, 'if you've lost that over-the-knee sock with the bow on.'

Guiltily I survey the empty banister where the clerical trunks usually hang and wonder if I have, through some unconscious compulsion, spirited them off to my potting shed. I survey the scrunched uniform shed by my son at last night's bath time and try to recall if I hijacked the tie. And I climb inside the family duvet covers in search of said sock because I remember putting it in the washing machine and I don't remember taking it out again.

Marriage and motherhood have exposed my criminal underside. And the volume of items that go  missing is shaming. Most of the Vicar's socks are without partners, the remote control for the DVD has not been seen since an evening of back episodes of Rev, my son's homework book vanished in transit from sofa to school bag and the children had to sprint the mile to school when the car key went missing.

'Go and look in your handbag,' says the Vicar when a new loss is discovered. My handbag is suspected to be the repository for most of the swag and admittedly it has yielded some surprising items. A jar of puttanesca sauce was lately discovered inside; the eight-year-old's only intact pair of school socks and a large, much mourned plastic spider.

In time, the swimming trunks are discovered in the Vicar's sports bag. The sock turns up in the garden pond and the school tie has evidently joined four other school ties in a parallel reality.

Briefly I am exonerated. 'I wasn't blaming you!' says the Vicar, unearthing the lost car key from his cassock pocket. I resume my search for the iron, previously used last summer. Strangely only I have noticed its disappearance. I run it to earth in the shoe polish crate just as a cry echoes downstairs:

'Mum, where have you hidden my hairbrush?'

What goes missing in your family and are you the one who is blamed?

Comments

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. Sorry, Caroline, hope it was you and not me who removed this by mistake!

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  2. I find that buying those 5 packs of identical socks hides a lot of sins and the thing that goes missing the most in our house is the kids' chocolate. Just can't imagine where that is *whistles* ;)

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    1. Chocolate is the one thing my my kids can't blame me for since I regularly find stashes of wrappers inside toy boxes in their wardrobes.

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  3. Oi!! Have you half inched all the lids to my Tupperware? X

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  4. It's middle child who is the guilty party.

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  5. Socks, swimming costumes, rain jackets, shoes.... Never, ever my fault of course!
    www.http://living-in-an-expat-bubble.blogspot.com

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  6. The Mr's underwear, kids socks, and whatever my family plan on wearing that day, oh and of course the kids chocolate but that's not stealing that's saving them from tooth decay and childhood obesity ;)

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    1. Now underwear is an interesting one for the Vicar swears there are items in his drawer that are not his and suspects that I am to blame for reasons I'm disinclined to examine.

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  7. Ah so it's YOU that has all of Papapsaurus's missing socks. I knew it.
    I blame the washing machine every time ;)

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  8. Sanity. That seems to have been stolen or removed from this family a long time ago.

    Great post.

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    1. Why, thank you. Sorry about the loss of your sanity, but definitely don't have any going spare here.

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  9. Ah, I have Actually Daddy to blame. He is the random transporter of random items to random locations in our house. I may have benefitted from this excuse once or twice ;)

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    1. You live just up the motorway don't you? Could he be at the root of all our losses too?

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  10. Oh so it was you who lost my hairbrush and tweezers - my eyebrows and scalp are out of control! X.

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    1. A kind friend, concerned by my inadequate operations with the Vicar's razor, brought me a pair of tweezers on a recent visit. Would be happy to lend them should we ever meet...

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  11. I've lost a hairdryer. How can you lose a hairdryer, for heaven's sake? I confess it was me.

    Does your daughter really call you dead meat? Has she lost her manners?

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    1. I'm sorry to say that she does on occasion. She's trying out insults in preparation for her teen years and has already warned me that she will soon have to start to swear. I daresay her manners are in my handbag...

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  12. Oh yes, this goes on in my house too. And when people ask me where things are I sometimes reply "It's not my responsibility to know where YOU have put YOUR things", and sometimes I just tell them exactly where they are, because I often do know, dammit.

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    1. I need to be steelier, don't I! But the fact is, I, like you, keep a mental inventory of stray possessions in readiness for when the cry goes out.

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  13. Hilarious post! Thank you (and i love your background...shame I don't have blogger...:-) I'm like your previous commenter, Jackie. When my husband (and yes, its usu him) asks me where his stuff is that he leaves lying around for days on end 'Where have you tidied it away?' is the usual question, I point out that how could I know when its HIS stuff?! Oh the merry dances we lead...

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  14. Great writing. Just discovered you through 3 Children & it

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  15. Haha this always happens in our house too!

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    1. Mysterious, isn't it, how all we women are closet criminals!

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