This is what it's come to: I'm a grown woman and I hid my son's shoes on purpose.

This morning the boys couldn't leave to go on their run because I'd hidden Sean's shoes. You read that correctly. In a move formerly known as juvenile and petty, I hid his tennis shoes yesterday. I asked him multiple times yesterday to pick his shoes up off the floor: first at the base of the stairs on the way up to his bedroom. Then after I asked that of him repeatedly, he threw them at the top of the stairwell that goes down to our front door. Neither place was actually getting the shoes out of the way. I fumed. And then picked up multiple items I'd been asking him to clean up, and hid them in the closet in my "office." 

This child only has one pair of tennis shoes. Foolishly I thought it would be days before it would even occur to him to look for them, because most days of the week, how often do we even leave the house much less need a specific pair of shoes?

In the wee hours of the morning around our house, the only sound to be heard is our dog whimpering, pacing, waiting for both my husband and son to go on their run. She wants to leave the moment our alarms go off, they want to leave as soon as they're dressed and used the facilities. I want them all to leave quickly so I can sit in my quiet office-space-laundry-room-distance-learning-zoom-room and write and type in peace. This morning I wondered momentarily why they were taking so long to leave the house, but then I could hear their whispered voices talking about Sean's shoes. Dammit! The shoes!

I went into the closet and retrieved the shoes, only slightly embarrassed as I handed them to my husband and fessed up to my actions. As they finally left the house, I berated myself for not pulling off a better act of retribution:

I should have hidden the shoes on a day when they weren't leaving the house the next morning at 5:30am.

I should have hidden the shoes in a different room, so that I didn't have to fess up to my own petty vengeance!

I should have hidden the shoes back in my son's room; he never would have looked there!

Or maybe I could keep at the hard work of communicating with my pre-teen son. Maybe I could find more ways to dialogue with him about caring for his things and how it impacts the rest of the family. Maybe I just shouldn't have hidden the shoes.

Most of the time I feel justified in my actions, because I am tired of cleaning up the house. I walk around the house all day asking people to pick up their stuff that they've strewn everywhere. For example: when I pick up a small squishy toy that looks like it's been chewed by a wildebeest, ingested and vomited back up, dust bunnies clinging to it, suctioned to the hardwood floor, and I throw that toy away? INEVITABLY a child will immediately be called by some inner movement that I can only chalk up to karma - and that child, who won said small toy at an outdoor street fair 2.5 years ago - will suddenly and for no particular reason want to throw something away. As that child opens the trashcan lid with her foot, she will see her beloved, nasty toy that meant so much to her, and she will berate me for throwing it away. 

Either I leave it on the ground, or I take care of it myself. Or I create some juvenile way in which to make them feel the pain, like hiding their shoes.

Living together as a family is always a challenge, but even more so during the time of COVID. The togetherness inspires rash decisions - like hiding an 11 year old's shoes and throwing away a piece of crap toy. But isn't it possible that these small lessons we learn in our interpersonal relationships have a bigger meaning in the world?

The greatest joy and the hardest-won accomplishment is when my family is sitting around the table playing a game together. The laughter and shared moments are the glimmering memories that make every other little annoying thing worth it. But to get to those moments, we need everyone to pitch in and help with chores, we need everyone to pick up after themselves, and we need everyone speaking to each other with respect, even when we don't agree. This is the most basic, fundamental thing we can teach our children, and it's the recipe for contented living - whether it's during COVID or not.

As we move into month 7 of a global pandemic, as we grieve the loss of over 200,000 Americans dead from Coronavirus, and as we move towards the presidential election, my hope for our country is this: that we remember who is in our family. It's not just the people who look like me and believe the same things that I do. It's also the people who have a completely different experience of living in the US - for good or for ill. We are all in this together. We can continue to fight with each other; we can continue to hide each other's shoes, to place blame at the feet of someone else (pun intended), to walk around feeling righteous about our role in this family and how no one appreciates me. OR we can lay aside our differences, turn off the cable news stream which locks us into our own belief system, and begin to treat each other as family, no matter what.

Those who seek power - be it foreign governments, our narcissistic president, white supremacists - they want us to keep hiding each other's shoes. To keep waiting for that gotcha moment when we can blame and point fingers at each other. What would happen if we began to dialogue with each other about what matters to us in this country? Not easy comments in a social media feed, but an actual conversation? Not following a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories on the internet, but actually speaking to one another on the phone or in person with masks on? 

What could we create as a people? What could we create as a family? Hopefully in some future setting we could return to the proverbial dinner table with our fellow Americans and trade goodwill with each other. But that is reliant upon all of us to vote in new leadership, to speak and dialogue with those who believe something different, and to look one another in the eyes as family.