The Naughty Chair
The first lesson I ever learned about consequences
Every child has that place.
The corner. The stairs. The dreaded trip to their room.
For me, it was The Naughty Chair.
Capital letters earned.
The Naughty Chair was a large, overstuffed armchair in our living room. It sat near the fireplace, and because I was approximately the size of a garden gnome, my feet never touched the floor when I sat in it. I would climb into it under protest and spend the duration of my sentence staring at the room, contemplating my crimes.
The length of time depended entirely on the offense.
Minor infractions earned a short stay. Major offenses could feel like a life sentence.
And one particular crime committed when I was about five years old earned me a lengthy stretch in The Naughty Chair.
My mother had a beautiful string of pearls. Not costume jewelry. Not plastic beads.
Real pearls. Hand-strung pearls. The kind of necklace a woman treasures.
One afternoon she had left them in a small dish on the coffee table.
Now, this coffee table deserves its own paragraph.
It was solid wood, built from the bow of a boat from a boat-building factory in Maine. It was sturdy, beautiful, and—most importantly to five-year-old Elizabeth—the perfect height for performances.
I was a child who was constantly putting on what I referred to as “numbers.”
There was singing. There was dancing. There was dramatic interpretation. There was absolutely no audience consent involved.
I would climb onto that coffee table and perform as though I were headlining Madison Square Garden instead of entertaining two exhausted parents who had already seen the show approximately 600 times.
On this particular day, midway through one of my productions, I spotted the pearls. And I had a thought. A truly terrible thought.
You know those moments when an idea enters your brain fully formed and you immediately mistake it for genius? That was this.
Clearly, I reasoned, this performance could only be improved by accessories. Specifically, pearls. Specifically, pearls swung dramatically over my head.
So I grabbed the necklace and began twirling it above me like a rodeo champion.
For a few glorious seconds, it was magnificent. Then physics entered the chat.
The string snapped.
And suddenly dozens of tiny pearls exploded into the air.
They pinged off walls. They bounced across hardwood floors. They shot under furniture. They scattered in every conceivable direction.
For one brief, horrifying moment, it looked like a pearl grenade had detonated in our living room.
The music stopped. The performance ended. The audience was not impressed.
And I earned myself a long stay in The Naughty Chair. I don’t remember exactly how long I sat there. Time moves differently when you’re five. Five minutes feels like an hour. Twenty minutes feels like exile.
What I do remember is sitting there with my feet dangling above the floor while my parents crawled around the living room collecting pearls.
One by one.
Under the couch. Behind the television stand. Beneath the coffee table where my brief but memorable jewelry-enhanced performance career had come to an abrupt end.
At the time, I thought The Naughty Chair was punishment. Its entire purpose, as far as I was concerned, was to make me miserable. But looking back, I think it served a different purpose.
It forced me to sit still long enough to think.
Not just about what I had done, but about what happened because of what I had done. That’s a lesson you don’t really appreciate as a child.
When you’re little, you think consequences arrive all at once.
You do the thing.
You get in trouble.
The end.
But that’s not how life works. Most consequences ripple. A snapped string becomes pearls scattered across an entire room. A careless word becomes a hurt feeling. A bad decision becomes a problem that takes days, weeks, or years to clean up.
And sometimes other people are left helping pick up pieces you scattered.
The older I get, the more I realize life still has a Naughty Chair.
It just looks different now. It’s the long run where you finally admit you were wrong. It’s the sleepless night after a bad decision. It’s the quiet drive home. It’s any place where you’re forced to sit with yourself long enough to think, “Well. That didn’t go the way I intended.”
The funny thing is that I don’t remember how angry my parents were. I don’t remember what was said. I don’t even remember whether every pearl was recovered.
What I remember is the chair. The oversized chair where my feet couldn’t touch the ground. The chair where I sat and learned, probably for the first time, that good intentions don’t prevent consequences.
I wasn’t trying to destroy my mother’s necklace. I was trying to improve the show.
Which, honestly, feels like a pretty accurate summary of a surprising number of mistakes I’ve made in my life.
Thankfully, unlike my mother’s pearls, most things can be restrung.
And if you’re lucky, age teaches you two things: How to clean up your own messes.
And when to leave the pearls in the dish.