Just open up your eyes

The mustard is on the bottom shelf, right next to the mayonnaise, where it always is.

It's the third time I've told this to the 13-year-old. He's been squatting next to the open refrigerator door for five minutes.

"I can't find it," he says frustrated. "It's not there." While he struggles, the cat has jumped onto the counter and is feasting on the deli meat he was going to put in a sandwich.

"It's right there," I tell him.

"No, it's not!"

"Did you look?"

"Yes, I looked!" he barks, slamming the appliance door and pushing the cat to the floor.

This is the point where I sigh and suggest he needs glasses. And next will be the point where his teenage mouth connects directly with that huge sarcasm section of his teenaged brain, and he'll mutter with dripping acidity that maybe I need glasses - or better yet, a telescope.

I don't wait for it. Instead, I get up, walk to the refrigerator, open it, bend down, remove the bottle of mustard and wave it for his viewing pleasure. It was on the bottom shelf, right next to the mayonnaise, where it always is.

This isn't new, but it's just as frustrating as every other time it happens. And if I had a quarter for every other time it has happened I could afford to live luxuriously in Tahiti, where I would wear a loin cloth and cook warthog on a spit, no refrigerator in sight and no teenager with dripping acidity.

All you have to do, I tell our boys when they're searching for something, is open your eyes. Nothing inanimate has, to my knowledge, ever gotten up and moved of its own accord. Nor has it left the house and moved to Pensacola just to aggravate you.

You should see their reactions when I say this. They know I've scored one on them. That, as much as they'd love to prove it, their missing sneakers or music player or the ten dollar bill their grandma gave them couldn't have just walked away. And believe me, having to admit that fact to the parent who just slam-dunked them with it is even more painful than losing again on Level 64 of their Bug-Eyed Flesh-Eating Bikers IV video game, which they've been trying to beat for a month.

So they respond by giving me their signature eye roll, which insinuates that I'm an ignorant cretin who probably couldn't locate his own tongue even after 481 tries, and that as soon as the first of them turns legal age I'm going to be committed to an asylum in the remote Canadian wilderness, where the doctors on staff still think a good 5,000-volt zap never hurt anybody.

But I mean: How hard is it to look under the coat you tossed carelessly on the floor to reveal that underneath it are the gloves you have stomped impatiently around the house looking for for the past ten minutes? How hard is that instead of pointing at the floor where the coat is lying and screaming, "They were just here? Who took them?"

I pose this question, and just the slightest glimmer of this realization appears on the 13-year-old's face. But he's a teenager, and teenagers are never wrong, even when they're wrong, so he taps the Sarcasm keg in his brain again, and responds with a smug "I don't know. How hard is it to look?" This earns him time in the penalty box, extra garbage and dishes detail and a blistering lecture from his mother, which begins, "I oughta pull that smart mouth off of you and glue it to your behind!" and then gets really scary.

Look, I tell them repeatedly. And if you've looked, look again. And if you've already looked again, actually spend more than eight seconds at it and look again before pitching a hissy. You'll notice that your mother and I can always find our stuff, and that's because we actually look for it.

Yes, that's a lie. I can't find anything. But at least I look a good ten seconds before pitching a hissy.