I judged you. Want to judge me?

If I told you my sins would you judge me? If I mentioned that I stole as a kid because I saw what I couldn’t have, would you scold me? Would there be feigned sympathy in your eyes when you heard the insults that were slung my way? The anger that I felt for going to school wearing clothing that was pulled from a trash can filled with maggots. Thank God for laundry detergent. Or that I smelled like mold when the clothes on my body were still wet because we didn’t have a dryer. Everything was hand washed; did you know people still did that in their bathtubs? Would you be irate if I said the money I collected from you for chocolate bars at school actually filled my lungs with cigarette smoke? I would be if I were you. Would you look the other way if you saw me stuff my backpack with toilet paper at school because we were using newspaper at the house? Or what about that extra milk carton I stashed when no one was looking because I needed cereal in the morning. I used to love free lunches at school; my meal for the day. Weekends were miserable. Or what if you happened to catch me in the mall and saw the shirts/jeans/skirts I stuffed up my sleeves because I couldn’t stand not to be in fashion any longer. So many taunts and so many teases; I was just a child coming of age. I needed to be asked out for the school dance. What words do you say to the little girl, in junior high, looking at the cute boy? Sorry sweetie, he’s going to ask one of the popular girls. She can dress nicely, and has a bit of money. Just wait your turn.

 

Money won’t buy you happiness; but I sure thought it could. That’s the lesson I learned when I was a teenager.

 

When I was a teenager, about the age of thirteen, I had been thieving for five years. My first episode was a bit amusing I must admit. I was eight, and in the grocery store with my family. Do you remember the clothing departments in say something like a Meijer, with the circled racks of clothes? The ones the kids would use to hide in? I saw a box of chocolates and really wanted a sweet something. Mother told me we couldn’t afford it and to put it back. I wandered off and enjoyed my box of chocolates in one of those circled racks of clothing; right in the middle of it, like the eye of a tornado, just waiting out the storm.

When finished, my family had moved on with their shopping and were nowhere in sight. What to do now? I was smart, and knew just go back to the car. They’ll find me. Well they did, but not without a bit of amusement first.

I walked out of the store and sat on the hood of my car and waited patiently for my family to come out of the store. It took them a couple of hours. And my mother was in tears when I saw her again. It seems they thought something had happened to me. I had gone missing. I had been kidnapped, something tragic. The police were called, the entire store was on lock down, and video cameras were surveyed. No one could find me. Eventually the police told my mother to go home and that if they uncovered anything she would be notified. My mother approached the car.

“Hi Mom. What took you guys so long?” I was an impatient little cuss and had grown tired of the dazzling police lights and rushed footsteps a distance away. I wanted a bed.

Immediately my mother wrapped me in her arms, drenching me with her salty tears and she checked me from head to toe.

“Where were you? I was so worried,” holding me at a distance, staring me up and down then enveloping me in an embrace.

“I’m fine. I was just sitting here.”

And then she snapped. “What do you mean you were sitting here? Do you mean to say you just came out of the damned store and sat here waiting for us! I called the cops. We had everyone in the store looking for you! You are in so much trouble!” With a face disfigured with rage and eyes blazing red, I knew I was in for it.

“Um, well, I was picked up by someone. But he let me go.” My first lie. I had learned from that point that these would help me move throughout the world. I began my little con game.

I wove my web of lies and had the police searching for some decrepit man with a cane. I told the police that he had offered me candy, a box of chocolates (and showed them the emptied container as proof) and that he let me go. Everyone believed me. My mother, especially, wasn’t taking any chances after what happened with my sister’s father…

They never did find that “man.”

My mother became suspicious of my five finger discounts when I was twelve. For four years she never noticed. Never saw me in the isles of the checkout counter grab a candy bar and bend down to “tie my shoe,” nor the new jewelry I wore “a gift from a friend,” the outfits and discarded tags “something I’m borrowing.” But finally, when I stole a new door knob she realized something wasn’t right.

I had been sick and tired of being paranoid that someone would slip in my room in the middle of the night or steal my belongings when I wasn’t around, and so I thieved a new doorknob from the store with a lock on it. My mother asked, “Where’d you get the money?”

My newest lie, “I have a friend with a rich uncle. He lets her buy anything she wants. She hooks me up on things like this.”

My mother bought it. Maybe that or she just didn’t know what to do with someone that stole.

It all came crashing in the end when a bully began picking on me at school. I didn’t know how to handle this and so I made a deal with God.

“God,” I prayed, “If you get this girl off my back, I’ll stop stealing.”

It worked and I haven’t stolen since. I have even become so exact in my accounts that I drive my friends batty asking them to borrow things, always checking that I return the exact amount. People just think I’m weird with my obsessive compulsions.

The moral is simply this: don’t be quick to judge. There is a reason for everything. Stop to ask why and not what did you just do?