Today Tyler stumbled downstairs, walked past me with no greeting, made a beeline for his computer, and bleary-eyed, flicked it on.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

“I’m playing Fortnite,” was his monotone response.

“You’re kidding…right?” I could only see the back of his head, but I was sure he had the most serious of expressions.

“What?” he asked. “It’s Saturday. This is what I do on every normal Saturday.”

I thought of what he said about “normal Saturdays.” It is true–last Saturday and every Saturday before that, this was his routine. He would wake up and stare at his computer screen all morning long, uninterrupted, Fortnite characters in full suits of armor dancing with ridiculous abandon, the mindless chatter of his friends streaming from his cellphone. He’d take his hand away from the keyboard only to reach into a box of crackers, which he would call breakfast if I didn’t deliver him a plate of eggs, which would remain on his desk half-eaten if I didn’t come back to pick it up.

It’s so easy to say to step on the soapbox and recount the days of my own youth, when I’d wake up to a structured weekend schedule and contribute cheerfully around the house. But I remember those Saturdays all too clearly, staring blankly at our big box of a TV set with wooden panels, taking in all ninety minutes of the Smurfs, sighing and cranking up the volume as my mom vacuumed beneath my feet.

He was right. For as long as I can remember, this was weekend normalcy. And suddenly, it didn’t seem so normal anymore.

“Let me tell you about the new normal,” I began. “You’re going to go back upstairs and start your day by reading a book. Not an e-book. A book made of paper, with actual pages. After that, you’re going to get dressed, put up your blinds, and pick all the clothes up off your floor. Then, there’s this kind of food that actually grows in the ground, and you’re going to look for it in the kitchen. Only then can you go back on Fortnite.”

I’ll spare you the part all the way up to where he finally ended up in his room, door slammed, a book reluctantly open on his lap.

Five minutes later, I returned to find him staring at his book, cell phone blasting the deafening cacophony of his favorite band, “Skillet,” through his earbuds.

“Why do you still have your phone?” I demanded.

“I can’t focus without music,” he mumbled into his book.

I stared. He kept reading.

“Hand it over,” I said.

“It’s not fair,” was his defeated response as he slapped the phone into my hand.

I closed the door behind me, to leave him uninterrupted in blissful, brain-resting silence, for him to finally learn, at thirteen years old, how to lose himself in another world between the pages of his novel.

If only all the world’s injustice looked like this.

Yesterday I discovered a black hand print on our white bathroom sink.

“Which one of you put a hand print on the sink?” I demanded to the three suspects, who were buried behind their iPads in the living room.

“It wasn’t me,” they chanted on cue.

A mother knows her babies’ handprints, and so I shifted my focus to primary suspect #1.

“Anna, do you have something you need to tell me?”

You may recall that Anna just spilled her guts to a priest during her First Reconciliation last weekend, purging her soul of a laundry list of sins, thereby restoring it to its natural, pristine state.

“I didn’t do it,” she declared.

“Anna, the evidence is right there on the sink.”

“Why do you always blame me?” she persisted.

“Anna. You left your hand print.”

She blinked.

“I can match your hand to the hand print,” I decoded. “If they’re the same size, that means it belongs to you.”

I watched her blank stare melt into miffed acquiescence.

“Fine,” she huffed.

And with that, her newly pristine soul is black as the evidence before us.

Today was Anna’s first confession, otherwise known as the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation.

The Seal of Confession is the absolute duty of priests not to disclose what they learn during penance. Even parents are instructed never to ask their children what they’ve confessed. The absolution of sins is serious business, and it’s strictly confidential.

“So…wha’dja confess?” I asked Anna as she exited the booth.

“I told him that I sneaked on Roblox without your permission,” she said. “And that I ate candy when you didn’t know. That I stole chapstick out of Eva’s room, and I accidentally killed Gilbert when I threw dirty pennies in his fish bowl.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes. When you asked me to clean my room today, I shoved everything under my bed.”

The kid’s not dumb, I thought as I examined the tornado wreckage under her bed. Somehow she understood that sharing her confession would grant her full immunity.