To still find this incident odd

[interrogatedchild]

When I started year 7 I had long hair and another girl and myself would often style our hair.

One day we put our hair up in buns on the tops of our heads and used friends hair tie. Just a cotton headband, and I forgot about it and went home with it.

The next time I went round to friends the whole family were sitting in the kitchen and I was called through by friends dad. He proceeded to inform me I had 'stolen' her hairband, and I just remember him questioning me like (honestly) I was on trial at the stand. "So you didn't notice you had it in ... didn't you remember later. Couldn't you have called Mary?" (not her name.) It was awful. I didn't know how to deal with it at the time, so I just stammered my way through and then went home as soon as possible!

I don't know why but I occasionally think about this and - well, it's seriously odd, isn't it?

Yes, it is. Did Mary say anything to you about it afterwards?

Yanbu, he sounds like a nut job.

Wow. They sound unhinged!
Are you still in touch with her? (Fully expecting that to be a no)

Year 7? So how old are you now?

We 'drifted apart" Jam I suppose it was partly inevitable!

Ora I'm 32 now and so twenty years later, of course! I do occasionally try to make sense of things that happened in my childhood as I didn't really have parents to turn to (Mum was very ill with cancer and dad understandably was caught up in caring for her.) As a result I suppose a lot happened and I accepted it as normal, as you do, and years later look back and think 'eh!'

Very odd indeed. Was it encrusted with gems? Family heirloom? Or was he maybe just a controlling weirdo tight arsed monkey who was fed up of replacing inexpensive hair bobbles? I know which one I'm betting on.

Fair enough OP - but I can't help thinking your time would be better spent writing off the controlling weirdo loons as controlling weirdo loons and then doing something lovely and positive in the present. I say this as someone who has had help to do just that and life is certainly better this way

Oh I am only asking on here, not sitting muttering and shaking my head in a darkened room!

My friends dad stomped down to my mum and dad's once when I broke the bracelet off her newborn doll (it was the eighties). He also called me a bitch. I was 7/8 at the most.

There are some weird people in the world, aren't there?

I think the problem is that you don't know they are weird until you look back retrospectively. I also had some awful teachers; I had some great ones too but one was a spiteful bully and one was a paedophile! But at the time we all just trudged along with it.

I'm very glad you're not sitting in the dark tearing up pictures from your childhood! You've got my thinking about weirdness from my youth now - and the conclusion I have reached is that the parents of my generation were batshit effin crazy!

YANBU. Sometimes you have memories that still make you feel uncomfortable years later. Some people are really weird about stuff like that. They'll remember if they lent you a 10p biro and be insistent about getting it back. I think he was probably a controlling man who didn't like his children having friends and it was probably more to do with making them feel uncomfortable having friends over than anything you did or anything to do with the hair bobble though.

Had the girl complained to her father? Was she upset about it too? Did you fall out?

Aer, I don't know. I honestly can't remember. I imagine she must have 'accused' me of stealing it (she had done something similar in primary school that I do remember) but regardless it just strikes me as so odd that a grown man could have bullied and frightened a little girl like that.

Of course I didn't see it that way at the time!