The question
My girlfriend and I are hosting two long-time friends of mine and their bright and very polite daughters, aged 11 and 13. One night there was a mess of makeup on the bathroom floor. The girls apparently tried on some of my girlfriend's makeup from the medicine cabinet. We left it at that. The next day, while they were out on a day trip, my girlfriend discovered some of her makeup and makeup brushes missing. I am ashamed to say that we looked in the girls' bags and found the stolen items. Now what do we do? We're considering approaching our friends. While awkward, that may be the most fair to them as parents. But given the ages of the daughters, perhaps a note left in their bags might be most effective?
The answer
Eleven and 13, you say? Yes, that can be quite a sticky-fingered age. I think I was around 12 when I started wearing my father's army coat and stuffing candy bars and comic books into its capacious pockets, unbeknownst to local shopkeepers.
I had a talent for it. Never got caught. I was like an evil cross between Robin Hood and the Easter Bunny, handing out my ill-gotten booty to all my impecunious friends.
Then I graduated to music. FYI to the kids out there: In those days to steal music you couldn't just press a button on your computer. You had to slip this giant flat thing called an "LP" inside your coat and attempt to slither out of the store unnoticed.
Then I moved on to clothes – and that's when I took my first "pinch," at age 16. With supreme savoir faire and insouciance (I thought) I slipped on what, in retrospect, was a hideous, ill-fitting corduroy jacket in the men's department of the Hudson's Bay Co. and casually attempted to saunter out of the store.
(Confidence is the key to successful shoplifting: That's how those guys managed to walk out of HBC with an unbought canoe on their heads a few years ago.)
I didn't notice the guy in the other compartment of the revolving door until it spat us out on the street. He turned out to be the HBC house dick, who grabbed me by my purloined corduroy collar and dragged me to a back room.
As it happened, I had a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in my pocket – the Penguin paperback edition, which had a picture of a topless woman on the cover, for some reason.
The HBC rent-a-cop eyeballed this artifact long and hard with detached curiosity while I blubbered and begged for mercy.
"Please, boo hoo, I don't mind going to jail, just don't tell my parents" – as if my parents wouldn't wonder where I was when I didn't show up for dinner for three years.
"Do you think you're beyond good and evil?" he asked me.
"No, no, sir, it's just a book, he's a philosopher, I'm so sorry, boo hoo hoo …"
Finally, he let me go. That encounter more or less scared me straight.
But I guess it might have been better if my larcenous tendencies had been nipped in the bud. And when I think about it, I probably wouldn't have stolen from a friend's mother.
So, yes, I would go to the parents, and tell them what happened. But quite off-handedly, I would say. Like: "Hey, it's no big deal, but I thought you should know ... " .
After all, what's a couple of makeup brushes? And I know (now) it's wrong to steal, but at that age there's still so much kid in them. They see something bright and shiny that they want, it's hard to fight off the urge simply to grab it.
Now, you may have to deal with the question of what you were doing rifling through your friends' daughters' backpacks.
Head that one off at the pass. I would be a) upfront and b) duly apologetic about it. After all, truly, technically, even as house guests they have the right to an expectation of privacy.
A right you violated. But I think you can say to the parents, that your girlfriend had enough "probable cause" to lead her to stick her proboscis where it would normally never probe.
Once you have revealed the crime, these girls' parents might be too easy on their kids for your taste.
Or they might come down too hard. They might (what I think I'd do, in their shoes) force the kids to return the brushes, and apologize, in a big, awkward ceremony.
In that case, your job is to be gracious and forgiving. You get to play good cop to the parents' bad cop. Don't feel sorry for your friends. "Bad cop" is part of any parent's role, especially as kids enter teenage years.
Whatever they decide to do, it's their call. Make it clear it doesn't change your opinion of them, or their daughters (which, from the tone of your letter, seems to be the truth).
After all, anyone can make a mistake. When whatever reprisal is over, file this under E for Experience and move on.
David Eddie is an author and the co-creator of the TV series The Yard , airing this summer on HBO Canada.
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