Behind our bungalow is a 1980s two-story apartment that we’ve rented to various people over the years, and alongside this apartment is a dog run of gravel and dirt. I keep my potting bench there as well as the tomato cages, PVC pipes, and cement buckets. The apartment AC unit is back there too. To us adults, it’s a storage space and dumping ground. To the children, however, it is their gardens. Lee has watered the ground, cultivating a little patch of baby’s tears, grass, and weeds located between the AC unit and the apartment’s water heater. Rose’s garden is the patch of ground in front of the AC unit.
With the spring rains and sunshine, the area was looking less like a dumping ground and more like a secret garden. It was lush and green and cool and inviting—except where some suspicious brown liquid pools in a cement bucket, which I suspect the youngest uses as his personal commode.
The other day, while my oldest was at school, the younger two were playing nicely in the backyard, and I suggested they let the rabbits out to play. I glanced at the side of the apartment. “You could even let them run in that green area back there. It looks like the perfect place for rabbits.”
I left them to it, and later they showed me how they’d closed off the area behind the apartment to keep the rabbits contained. Later, I delivered them their lunches there, gagging as I passed by the bucket of brown liquid. I don’t think I would’ve had an appetite back there, but they didn’t seem to mind.
All seemed well until Big Brother came home from school. Then I heard a commotion in the backyard. In came the younger two with worried expressions. “Lee hit me on the back with a rock,” one said.
“He hit me on the neck with a rock,” the other said.
“He says we ruined his garden.”
Along comes Lee, stomping and talking big. “They COMPLETELY ruined my garden. There’s nothing left alive in it. I had to tear it all up because it’s been eaten to bits by the rabbits. Then I tore up Rose’s garden. I tore it all up!”
I was taken aback. “Did you throw rocks at them too?”
“Yes!” he said challengingly. “They deserved it. They deserve spankings!”
I’m speechless. “Oh my!” I say. “You took matters into your own hands. Didn’t you?”
“I wanted them to feel as bad as I do!” he says.
I made some trite remarks that I’m sure didn’t help the situation before telling Lee to go to his room to think things over. In reality, I sent him to his room so I could think things over. What on earth was I going to do now?
I began sweeping and mopping the kitchen. Movement helps me think.
There’s always the punish-everybody tactic. “Whip them all soundly and send them to bed.” That was very appealing, but that didn’t seem right after rocks had been thrown. The little sinners weren’t all at fault.
For a brief moment, I wished I’d kept a list of all the things Lee had destroyed in his thirteen years of life, so I could show him what he’d done. Then maybe I could tie in the story of the unforgiving servant. No. Too preachy.
Lee had taken the law into his own hands. That was against the family rules. But it didn’t seem right to give him a consequence only. Wasn’t it wrong for the other kids to use his garden? Then again, wasn’t I the one who suggested the kids put the bunnies back there? I was at fault here too. I had a vague recollection that this had happened before with this strip of earth. I couldn’t remember.
Without having a clear vision of what I was doing, I asked Lee to show me the damage done to his garden.
He took me out past the Rabbit hutch and alongside the narrow strip. The damage was pitiful. The long, lush grass had been torn up and trampled in my daughter’s garden in front of the AC unit. Behind the AC unit, my son’s plot looked even more dejected than my daughter’s. There were bare patches of earth, and all the baby’s tears were torn out. A rabbit couldn’t have done that.
“It was so ruined that I had to pull it all up,” he said.
As we looked at the mess, I confessed my part in the situation to him.
“Then I should’ve torn up your garden!” he said to me.
“Uhu,” I replied, but no that wasn’t right either, I thought.
Then he seemed to calm down and asked me not to let the rabbits in his garden again. “How much money do you think would fix your garden?” I next asked.
“A hundred!” he said, but after we talked about labor and the prices of a flat of baby’s tears, we settled on fifty.
“I will pay you fifty for the destruction of your garden,” I said. The moment I said it, I regretted it. Gosh, what was I saying?! That’s a lot of money. I wasn’t even sure I had that kind of cash in the house. We went inside, and I pulled out my cash envelope. I had fifty-one dollars. I handed over fifty, starting to feel peeved with myself for what this fight was costing me. What about the thrown rocks!? Well, I decided I’d get to that later.
“Look,” I showed him my nearly empty cash envelope. “I only have one dollar left.” I admit, that was manipulative, and he knew it.
“Are you trying to make me feel bad?” he accused.
“I thought you might want to see how much this is costing me,” I said.
Then he gave me ten dollars back.
“Please go back to your room now,” I told him. “I’m going to have Rose look at the destruction to her garden.”
I went out with Rose next, and she showed me what Lee had done. She even informed me that Lee had pulled up most of his own garden in anger. As we looked back over the sorry scene, I asked her, “How much money do you think it would cost to repair your garden?”
“I dunno,” she replied.
“Maybe $40 worth?” I asked with sudden inspiration.
“I guess,” she said.
We marched into Lee’s room, where I notified him that the assessed damage to Rose’s garden was $40. It was his responsibility to pay Rose now?
As you might guess, Lee is aghast. He wanted to know if $40 was really the amount of damage done. Had Rose come up with that number or did she think the damage was $50? I overrode such questions demanding payment be made, and when it was given, I assigned Lee several jobs for throwing rocks. He insisted the jobs would be a cinch, and off he went.
Body movement must’ve given him time to think because when he returned from taking out the trash, he asked me, “Mommy, if I had not ruined Rose’s garden, would I have been able to keep the 40 bucks?”
“Yes,” I replied. Although, if he had not ruined Rose’s garden or thrown rocks, we would not have been in this interesting situation to begin with.
Don’t ask me if people learned the lesson they were supposed to learn. I’m not even sure what that lesson might be: Make sure you’re punishing the right person before going on a garden-wrecking spree? Always overestimate damages. Don’t feel sorry for the price criminals have to pay, even if they only have one dollar left!
Maybe if I’d thought through it more, I might’ve landed on a better course of action, but as a parent, these situations come up every day multiple times with different players and different offenses. Thus, it is what it is: bumbling attempts to parent in faith that God is making a garden of all we wreck and try to grow. And I think it cost him way more than $40.
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Who Owes What to Whom
I was once a bookkeeper. I know money and bills, loans and interest, checks and balances. I know who owes what to whom. And let me tell you, the accounts are not in balance.
Oh my! Not easy to be judge and jury!