Joey Did It!!!

I can remember when Melanie was about eighteen months old or less, I was so angry with her I just couldn’t stand it. I walked in the living room and she had taken every Kleenex out of its box. I was so frustrated I called my mother and told her about it. My mother laughed and said, ‘Oh Honey, you have a lot to look forward to as she grows up”
At that point in my life I was a fanatic on keeping my house clean and picked up. Clutter was something I just couldn’t handle. I learned to adjust to a child’s clutter such as toys and sofa pillows that were thrown to the floor. However, nothing prepared me for my second child. A boy named after his father, Wallace (Joey). He was absolutely the cutest baby in the world. He had bright red hair, so chubby, and little bitty angel kisses on his nose.
When he was two, he was a terror. I didn’t know if I would live through it. My sister-in-law said he was programmed to destroy. I believed her.
There was a part of me though, that could not believe that he was always responsible for all the things that were broken in our house. I even threatened Melanie not to tattle on Joey all the time.
One day when she was two years old she came to me and said,” Mama is it tattling if I told you that Joey is in the middle of the street sitting in his lawn chair?” I tore out of the house a hundred miles an hour to grab him and his chair before he was killed.
One evening my husband’s brother and his family came to play cards at our house. They had two little girls. The youngest one, Stacey, was just a few months younger than Joey. Joey was standing by the table watching us play cards when I heard a horrible crash coming from the living room. Quickly added was this little voice that said fearfully, “Joey did it!!” I knew then for sure that my cute little boy did not do all the things that he was being blamed for.
Sometime after that incident, I went outside to see what Wally was doing. He was working on the lawnmower. It wouldn’t start and he was very frustrated. He told me he thought Joey had put water in the gas tank, well that was just too much. I had taken some psychology courses, so I used them with Joey. I said, “Joey where did you get the water that you put in the lawnmower?” He said, “over there,” pointing to the outside faucet, “I don’t like that noisy thing.” I was devastated. The only thing I knew at that point was that he was not guilty of breaking the lamp the night that we were playing cards.
As Joey grew to be a man, he tried my patience until it screamed, but to this day, I have difficulty believing that he in fact has done all that he has been accused of.