What am I supposed to do? This situation comes up infrequently but often enough to make me feel like a failure. One child does something. Okay, it is not a good thing. Let’s say it’s five dollars missing. Stolen, we presume. Worse, it’s taken from a sibling. So we have this situation. One angry-eyed teenager, convinced that Nothing Will Be Done about his missing money, and three innocent-looking siblings, all managing to look very very sympathetic about their sibling’s plight.

Unless someone confesses, it is unlikely that I will track down the guilty party. I don’t have surveillance footage or exploding ink pellets (or whatever the current technology is). I refuse to play that old elementary school teacher game: “okay, we’ll just all be grounded until the guilty person admits what they did.” I will not punish the innocent. And yet I still have the angry-eyed boy, waiting for his justice. Waiting for his five dollars, actually.

This time, I can solve at least one problem. I take him aside, “reimburse” him for his loss.

“What, you’re not going to do anything about him?” This is the worst part of the problem. He assumes that one particular sibling is the guilty party. On the face of it, it really isn’t an illogical thought. That child has had some struggles with impulse control over the years. Luckily I have answers (and I still have my fingers on the five-dollar bill, which forces angry-eyed boy to listen.) We don’t judge someone, in this family, on their past. We don’t judge them on their tendencies. Today is a new day. We trust. We go on.

Angry-eyed boy settles down. Turns out he had a long day at school. He’s more tired than angry.

I’m pretty tired myself.