liar liar

Well, here's a new one for my memoirs...we had plans to go to friends for dinner Saturday night with the girls, so before we left I asked them all to get their soccer gear out and ready to go for the following morning, knowing we would likely be home late and that Sunday morning would come way too early and I would be stuck dealing with three kids running around wailing "where are my cleats? where is my jersey?" and we would once again be late getting to the field. Anyway, the girls did as I asked, and when Sunday morning arrived I got up feeling pretty confident that we were organized and on target to get to the games on time. Until I heard Elizabeth say "what the heck??? I know I put both my shin pads here yesterday, and now one of them is gone!" Fabulous. I looked her in the eye, and asked "tell me the truth. Are you sure you put them both here?" and when she answered a definite yes, I could tell she was for real. Elizabeth is a child who can do a great many things, but one thing she can't do well is tell a lie. So we started hunting, thinking maybe one of them had been accidentally kicked off to the side, but after searching every corner of their dressing room, we widened our search path. While a small part of my brain was still hoping at this point that the dog had picked it up and raced off with it in his mouth to greet someone at the door, the rest of my brain was becoming deeply certain that someone else in our household was the guilty party. Call it mother's intuition or whatever. After searching in all the obvious spaces that the dog might have dropped a shin pad, like the entry, the living room, and basically every other room in the house, I cornered my husband in the kitchen and furtively whispered my suspicions to him. He was very reluctant to go along with me however, and just said, well, you'd better be right. At this point he went outside to start looking around on the off chance that the dog had been the one to take it and perhaps had carried it outside when he greeted us the night before when we got home. I didn't think the dog had gone outside when we got home, but whatever. I returned to the dressing room where the girls were continuing to don their gear, and said "okay, if there is someone in this house who knows where the other shin pad is, you need to tell me now. IF you tell me now, I will not be angry with you. However, if you do NOT tell me now, I will be very upset, and you will be punished." No dice. So I start going through the dresser drawers, opening boxes, really digging through their stuff. Emily says, what are you doing Mom? And I reply, I don't think the shin pad is lost, I think the shin pad has been HIDDEN.
As the girls finish getting ready (minus one shin pad for Elizabeth) and sit down to eat, I continue to tear the house apart. I am now 99% sure I am right, and if I'm not, I will apologize on the spot. But I have no luck. By now Kate is in tears and is insisting that she doesn't know where the shin pad is, I PROMISE I didn't do it, she says, over and over, which is not a good sign, as this is her standard response after whacking one of her sisters in the head during a sibling battle. I am not even asking her if she did, after my initial comment to the girls about 'fessing up to the crime. I smell guilty all over her, but what can I do? I need proof. Finally time runs out, we have no choice but to leave if we are to make it in time. As the girls grab their water bottles and head to the door, Kate makes a detour into the dressing room, and Elizabeth is right on her heels. And sure enough, Kate walks straight over to a Disney Princess suitcase in the corner of the room, unzips it, pulls out the shin pad and says "oh look what I found..."
Honestly, how am I supposed to deal with this one? Since the clock was ticking, I just told Elizabeth to put it on, and everyone else to get in the car. I was feeling both vindicated and totally poleaxed at the same time. What the hell??? Crap. If there was a magic parenting genie that I could call on right now, I would, believe me. But since there isn't that I know of, we head to soccer, and I spend the morning biting my tongue, and basically not speaking to Kate at all. I guess I am a mommy monster, but it's like MY mom always told me, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
Several hours later soccer is over, and we are all home, and I get Mike and Kate alone in my room, lock the door and proceed to ask her how she knew where to find the shin pad. And that's about as far as we get, because she goes into melt down mode and just shrieks I didn't do it, over and over. So we calmly say to her that we know that she did do it, and we want to know why, and we want her to know that if she continues to lie to us about doing that she will be punished. We tell her this is her last chance to come clean and tell us the truth. Which she doesn't do, so our hand is forced and we tell her that she will not be allowed to have any play dates or attend any birthday parties for the rest of the school year - one month basically. Still she refuses to confess. So we carry on with our day, while Kate cries, and wails, and yells at everyone, and tries everything she can think of to get us to back down. And finally, finally, finally, after another hour of this, she asks me to come to the living room and sit with her for a minute. When I do she tells me, okay, yesterday Elizabeth hit me and I was mad so I hid her shin pad.
Well. I took a deep breath, and then thanked her for telling me the truth. Then I tried to have a short simple and calm discussion about how that's not a good way to cope with being mad, and that I had given her plenty of chances to come to me with the truth today. And I explained that while I was glad she had finally told me the truth, that she would still be punished for lying to me all morning.
I was bracing myself for another display of hysterics at this point, but she actually took it pretty well, and thankfully we moved on with our day without any further issues. I think by then she was just relieved to have it all off her chest. But what a gong show in the meantime. I swear, I feel like I am constantly being held hostage in my home by a small terrorist. And you know what they say, we don't negotiate with terrorists, right? Right. All I can say now is, Mommy needs a margarita....