I’ve never considered myself the paranoid type. Yes, I’m a single mom of two kids, my eight-year-old daughter, Lila, and my five-year-old son, Teddy, and sure, the world feels heavier when you’re the only adult in the house.
But paranoia? No. I’ve always prided myself on being the level-headed one in my family.
Which is why what started happening two months ago completely unraveled me.
The first strange thing occurred on a Tuesday morning, one of those ordinary, bleary-eyed starts when the kids had argued over toothpaste and I’d accidentally put dog food in the coffee maker because the bags looked too similar. (We don’t even have a dog. That tells you where my brain was.)
I walked into the kitchen expecting chaos. The night before, I’d left a sink full of dishes because Teddy had refused to go to bed without finding his blue superhero cape, and the search had consumed almost an hour. I’d collapsed afterward. Dishes could wait.
But when I stepped into the kitchen, I stopped dead.
The dishes were gone.
Not just rinsed, but washed. Dried. Stacked neatly in the cupboards. The pot I’d burned rice in looked brand new. The countertops gleamed. Even the floor, normally a battlefield of crumbs and sticky footprints, looked freshly mopped.
I stared, slack-jawed, for a full thirty seconds.
“Mom?” Lila padded in behind me in her unicorn pajamas. “Why are you standing like that?”
“Did you… clean?” I asked, already knowing she hadn’t. Lila was helpful in many ways, but dishwashing before dawn wasn’t one of them.
She shook her head. “No. Can I have cereal?”
My heart thudded uneasily through the rest of the morning. After dropping the kids at school and daycare, I called my sister, who laughed herself breathless.
“If someone broke in just to clean your kitchen,” she wheezed, “send them to my house next!” Continue reading…
