Would you like to see something that is horrifying or hilarious or both? YOU KNOW I KNOW YOU WOULD:
(If you can’t see it for one reason or another, it’s a padded mailing envelope on which someone has written, in what appears to be childlike printing: “I saw the condoms. I know your secret.”)
This is a mailing envelope that contains, yes, condoms. Some things to know:
1. This envelope is addressed to me. I don’t remember ordering condoms by mail, and in fact I actively remember routinely buying them in a store and NOT ordering them by mail, so I suspect this is an envelope fished long ago from the recycling in order to delicately conceal the condoms I bought from the store.
2. This envelope was at the bottom of Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer.
3. Paul got a vasectomy in 2011, as I know you know, so these condoms are in no way recent, and they have expiration dates compatible with that.
4. It has apparently been a long time since Paul did a tidying of his socks-and-underwear drawer.
5. We actually found this envelope in 2018 when we moved, but I forgot to mention it until finding it again today.
We have NO IDEA when the writing appeared, else we might be better able to narrow down who wrote it. My instinctive initial suspects are Rob and Henry (though I want to investigate this “starting the letter O from the bottom” clue, too). Rob is a bit of a black-and-white thinker, an idealist who doesn’t get along well with his dad and tends to think the worst; he would have been 12 in 2011, which is the last time there was need for condoms; I think if it had been written earlier than that, we would have seen it, though perhaps not. Henry is the prankster who once drew “scorch lines” over an electrical outlet with a Sharpie marker and then lay on the floor nearby with a fork in his hand pretending to be unconscious/dead. The main reason I didn’t freak out is that he had TOLD ME about this prank idea a week earlier, at which point I had told him seriously-and-no-kidding that he should never, ever do it and it would not be even slightly funny and it would truly scare and upset me, as well as making me very angry about Sharpie marker on the wall. He would have been 5 in 2011, but I think it’s more likely to have been written AFTER that; he was 11 in 2018 when we found it. It seems like an EARLY MIDDLE SCHOOL thing to do, but I’m just guessing.
But also: what secret did this child think they had discovered? Do we even want to turn our minds to it? Did the child think the secret was that their parents were having sex? That their parents were attempting to prevent pregnancy? Did the child have a faulty idea of what condoms were for? Did the child think that Paul was…having an affair, and that condoms were an indication of that, considering how many children we had at our house, indicating that WE apparently weren’t using them? But what would the child conclude about the fact that the envelope was addressed to me? And why was the child rummaging in Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer to begin with? THE MIND BOGGLES.
I would not be able to stop myself from investigating the writing. Perhaps with internet research about other letters if the O turned out to be inconclusive. This is the sort of puzzle with which my mind will not rest until solved.
You are right that the prank is not appropriate but I still laughed.
Oh, Henry, you stinker.
(Didn’t at least one of your kids talk about Baby #6? Like, in favor of same?)
I WANT TO KNOW THE SECRET. What secret did they know???
This is the best!
If a kid was real little, maybe he wouldn’t know if both parties knew that condoms were being used? (When I was little I knew condoms had to do with sex but I wasn’t sure what they were).
I’m just sitting here laughing right now.
Me too!
I love everything about this. 😂
I am silently scream-laughing right now, at the secret discovery and at the fork-in-the-outlet prank. My guess, based on nothing besides thinking back to being 11-ish, is that the secret is “there is sex being had.” Scandalous!
Agreed.
I’m getting a combo “I Know What You did Last Summer”/”The Call is Coming from Inside the House” vibe from this. Hilarious.
That is hilarious. Thank you.
I tend to lean towards the secret being that his parents were having sex. The hush-hush nature of it could be the fact that it was obviously recreational sex and not baby-making sex, and that concept is potentially scandalous to an 11-year-old. But this brings me to a request for a post on the specifics of how you introduced sex ed to your kids and at what age and if it was a one time thing or you had to keep repeating it and if the opposite sex parent was involved and most of all, how difficult was it or wasn’t it (emotionally) to give them whatever information you gave them.
Maybe the child thought YOU were having the affair and wrote that and put it in Paul’s drawer for you to discover?
Oh, the secret is totally that Mom and Dad are having sex. Now, how do we make your whole family write “The lazy brown fox” sentence? You know, the one that uses all the letters of the alphabet?
Okay but my question is, why do you think it couldn’t have been one of your other three children?
This is an amazing note and should be kept to be passed on when the culprit gets married.
I DON’T think it couldn’t have been one of the other three! Rob and Henry are just my instinctive/initial suspects.
Henry’s prank was absolutely diabolical and hilarious that he told you about it before he did it.
Are you the type of family that this could be a white elephant gift and it would be a hilarious find and possibly bring out the story, or would it be a mortifying experience and everyone would want to crawl under a rock?
I feel like it’s Too Soon To Tell! Right now everyone is still so very adolescent/YA. But LATER…
I am now in full-on mystery mode, and so I am surely twisting the information to fit into my Full-On Mystery Mode, but I can only wonder if Rob genuinely thought that his father was having an affair, and has had a bad relationship with him ever since due to this misconception??
Also, OH, HENRY. I remember that at that age, my brother got a weird science kit thing for his birthday, which for some reason included a fake plastic pile of throw-up (one of the main selling points to my brother), and we put it out to surprise our mother (we had quite a few pets, and so we were sure that it would work). She did a good job of pretending to be surprised! I have no idea how my brother convinced me that making someone think that something bad had happened would be fun, though!!!
ELLE, MY MIND HAS FLITTED IN THIS DIRECTION AS WELL
Please leave this on your kitchen table as the family gathers for dinner and report back. :)
I second this. All in favour say “aye!”
Do you have a singular lefty? The handwriting looks total lefty to me! Also, this whole thing is hilarious.
Yes! I came back to ask this very thing. The “o” is exactly how my lefty son writes it.
The writing looks just like that of my oldest, who is a righty, Henry’s current age but Rob’s temperament.
What a wild ride having children must be!!
I love this. To me that note doesn’t say ‘prank’, it’s got the serious intensity of a kid who thinks they’ve found a really shocking piece of incriminating evidence? Which would lean to Rob! I hope he’s not been labouring under a misapprehension for all these years. I remember as a kid (I was about 11) I went through a phase of being convinced my mum had a secret third marriage other than my dad and stepdad from something she said. To be fair though, I had only found out my stepdad had had an earlier marriage when I found a postcard addressed to him and his first wife in the garage a year or two earlier! So there was form for weird casually held family secrets.
Hahahaaa! You MUST follow up when you find out more about this. Also I want to hear more about Henry’s pranks.
Omg HENRY.
My father-in-law’s affair was actually discovered by his daughter (my sister in law) finding condoms in his apartment when she was in high school, so maybe that’s what they thought the secret was? The difference in that case was the dad had an apartment where he lived during the week for his job and came home on the weekends; I think he got the job while kids were in late high school and it didn’t make sense for the whole family to move or something. ANYWAY that would be my guess, weird as it is to think about. I don’t remember if she confronted the dad. I think she went home and told her mom she saw them or something.
When I was a kid we discovered condoms in the bedside table of my parents and we couldn’t figure out what they were for just by looking at them. We asked my mom and she said something like “they’re for your father” and we had by that time found the diagram that came with the box and the drawing was not exactly anatomically correct so we were persisting “but are they for his fingers? for his toes?” and then my sister spotted the actual written part of the directions and shrieked “they’re for his PENIS!!!” whereupon my mom dissolved into gales of laughter and started imitating us in a high kid voice “are they for his fingers? for his toes? HAHAHAHAHA”. Even then, we didn’t understand why my dad would actually need a stretchy covering like that as we knew nothing about the mechanics of sex or how exactly babies were made. We were maybe 5 and 6, give or take a year or two?
And this is why we made sure that we kept an open dialogue and flow of age-appropriate information with my kids from the get go. We always answered questions, but we also read books like Where Did I Come From and It’s Not the Stork with them when they were little.