Thieves in the House

I was an experienced thief by the time I was 12 years old. Oh, I didn’t steal big things. In fact, I was interested in only one thing – money. And in only one victim – my mom.

Money. The root of my evil. And not just any money – my mom’s money. The loot I stole from my mom was only coins – I did not deal in bills. I figured that actual dollar bills would be missed from my mom’s purse, but surely not coins!

I was not a crime boss. I was not part of a syndicate in which I would charge other people to commit the crime. No, I was a one-girl operation. I suspect, however, that there were other children living im the household – namely, my four siblings – who were running similar one-person operations.

The difficult part about having multiple thieves in your house is the possibility that the others had collected all the loot before you could. And if that happened, you had to wait days – sometimes weeks – before my mom’s wallet would be replenished. Timing was everything.

There were instances when, after all the planning and sneaky moves to get my mom’s purse, her wallet held no coins. Man! Was that a bummer! All the risk but no reward.

This was my operation:
My mom always kept her purse at a particular spot to the right of the refrigerator on the kitchen counter. We had a galley kitchen that opened to our family room on one end and a laundry/mud room on the other end. On the far end of the laundry room was the backdoor to our garage. The laundry room and kitchen could be separated with a sliding door that was usually kept open.

Our laundry room had a telephone on the wall and the kids often would shut the pocket door, cutting off the kitchen, and sit on the washing machine to make private phone calls.

My thieving self would casually walk into the kitchen as though looking for something, maybe a snack from the drawer where we kept our bread and cookies, which happened to be conveniently located just below where my mother stored her purse.

Being careful not to attract the attention of anyone who may be watching television in the family room, I surreptitiously took the purse, clutching it to my belly, using my body to block my sin from anyone in the family room, and walked to the laundry room. Once in the room I quickly closed the door, as though I were going to make a phone call.

I rapidly extracted the wallet from my mom’s purse, opened the coin section, and looked at the booty. If it was a good haul, there would be a bunch of quarters and little else.

Careful not to take all her change, I would stuff several coins into my pocket. That’s another thing: I had to make sure I was wearing something that had pockets!

I would then replace the wallet, hug the purse to my front, open the sliding door, and walk backwards into the kitchen, replacing the purse onto the counter from where I had grabbed it.

Thievery is all in the details. I made sure the purse was exactly where I had found it.

My burglary completed, I would grab a cookie from the bread drawer as though that was the reason I had wandered into the kitchen in the first place. My thieving continued for several years, and to my knowledge, my mom never knew. My most lucrative years were when I was nine or ten years old. Back then, a few coins w be enough to pay for all the candy I wanted from the dime store (the equivalent to today’s dollar store). As I got older, the coins weren’t enough to buy what I wanted – a record album, a gift for my mom’s or dad’s birthday. That’s when I started babysitting to actually earn money.

I never felt guilt for stealing from my mom. Isn’t that funny? ✿