When Bear, our oldest, was seven or eight years old he pulled a stunt that bested all previous stunts, to that point anyway. Things were hard that year as we’d lost our home in a fire and. having no insurance to speak of, it took a long time to replace what we needed. Mike had been hurt at work and his employer refused to allow the injury to be filed on workman’s comp.
He’d sent a broken ladder to the shop to be fixed. A couple of nights later the same ladder was back only without the repair sticker so Mike used it. And found someone had peeled the work-order off the ladder and put it back out without ever fixing whatever was broken. His employer said that because Mike trusted the repair department without checking the ladder himself to prove it’d been fixed, the accident (he climbed up and fell when the ladder gave) was his fault. Long story short, after six weeks with no pay while Mike was out of work, we called his father and asked for help. That’s how we wound up living in Ft. Worth, Texas for a year.
Christmas that year looked like it wasn’t going to happen. We were barely living pay check to pay check. I’d told both my mom and dad about our situation and they surprised us with money to get the kids something for Christmas! I remember crying while wrapping, thankful our kids would have something to open Christmas morning. When I was done wrapping I put the gifts under the tree and went to bed.
When I got up the following morning I went in Bear’s room to wake him. He wasn’t in bed, an odd thing as normally he wanted to “sleep in” and it took me a few tries to get him up. I found him in front of the tree sitting in a pile of torn paper and opened boxes, oohing and aahing over EVERY. SINGLE. PRESENT I’d wrapped the night before. He opened them all, he said, to make sure we’d bought the right things for the right brother and himself.
It took me a full minute, I think, to close my jaw and find my voice. I was stunned! My voice came out a bit louder than I intended and Bear nearly crapped himself. I told him I was going to have to think about what to do, that I might feel it suitable to return all the gifts since he’d opened them a week before Christmas. He cried and begged me not to return his brother’s gifts, saying they didn’t open them, just him. He wanted to make sure they weren’t punished for his deed, something that rarely happened with him. Normally he’d throw them under the bus so fast it’d make your head spin!
So I reboxed and rewrapped them while he was at school and kept them in my closet for a couple of days before putting them back out. All of them, including his. I think he and I both learned a lesson that year. He learned not to EVER unwrap the presents before hand and I learned his compassion for his brothers was greater than I’d given him credit for in the past. Now it’s just a funny store I tell most every Christmas just to watch him flush with embarrassment. Moms are good that way!