I don’t know what made me think to question him that Sunday afternoon. I was trying to be a helpful mom when I went into his room. Ya-ya would be picking him up any minute for a sleepover and the kid still hadn’t packed a change of clothes. When I walked into his room, he wasn’t to be seen. I thought maybe he slipped out to help his dad in the backyard. But then I heard rumbling from the closet.
My first thought was that he was trying to pull out his kiddie suitcase from the bottom of the closet. Which would have been damn near impossible considering the closet door on that side was still shut. During the week, Darius had tried to balance on a box to get something from an out-of-reach shelf in his closet, only to have the box collapsed and Darius to fall down with it. I thought maybe he was up to some monkey business.
I called to him “What are you doing in there?”
I expected a response along the lines of “trying to reach a sweatshirt,” or “getting my suitcase,” or “looking for my superman gloves.” But when he responded with “nothing” I knew that something was up.
For every parent knows that “nothing” never means nothing and always means “I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing but I don’t want to tell you for fear of getting into trouble.”
It took roughly 2.5 nanoseconds of interrogating for Darius to tell me the truth. It took me a few minutes to figure out that this has been going on for three weeks.
My kid has a stash.
Candies from a birthday partied that he attended at the beginning of the month. I don’t know how much was in there to begin with.
I get the feeling he’s been rationing those smarties for weeks.
