Oops, I Over-Coddled Again

I must continually remind myself: It's good for kids to have hard feelings.

For my birthday in November, my 13-year-old gave me a beautiful pair of earrings. He’d saved up for them, and they were just my style. For the next two weeks, I wore them constantly.

Until I lost one.

I was getting ready for bed one night, reached up to remove my earrings, and discovered that one was missing. Oh, shit. I searched my closet, in the couch where I’d just watched TV, on the bathroom floor….. it was nowhere.

My beautiful lone earring.

I was devastated, but even more than that I worried that my son would be devastated.

I immediately went into damage-control mode. I wanted to fix the situation without him finding out. I wasn’t sure where he’d bought the earrings, but I started sleuthing. I searched on Amazon, using various combinations of keywords. I couldn’t find them.

I then texted two of my good friends and asked them what they thought I should do. Maybe I could text my ex and ask if he knew where my son had bought them — would that be weird? Or perhaps I could surreptitiously asked my son where he bought them — but would he then suspect I’d lost one?

My friends had an opinion, and it was not one I was expecting.