I know now imps of the Prince of Darkness can disguise themselves as angels of light. Two of them live on my block.
Soon after we moved to our new home last February, my husband, Tim, and I were sorting through the boxes stacked in the garage. We looked up to see two little blond-haired girls standing in our driveway. “Hi,” the older one called. “Did you just move in?”
“Hi,” Tim answered, then hollered into the house for our three daughters. “Rebecca, Angela, Lucy, come meet our neighbors.”
Five-year-old Rebecca and three-year-old Angela came running out of the house. When they saw the two girls who looked to be just their ages standing in the driveway, Rebecca and Angela stopped and hung shyly behind Tim. One-year-old Lucy toddled up behind them.
“This is Angela and Rebecca and Lucy,” Tim told the new girls. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Chelsea,” the older girl answered.
“I’m Brittany,” her younger sister said.
“Hi. Where do you live?” Tim asked.
Chelsea pointed to a house three doors down from ours. A shiny, new Ford Expedition gleamed in the driveway. “Can the girls come play?” Chelsea asked.
“Are your parents home?” Tim asked.
“Yeah,” Chelsea answered. “You want to come meet them?”
We walked down the sidewalk and met Chelsea and Brittany’s mom heading our way. She smiled warmly and extended her hand. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m Lisa.”
For the first few months we lived in our new house, Rebecca and Angela played with Chelsea and Brittany almost every day. In the early afternoon, Chelsea would ride her bike into our driveway and ring her bell. Like Pavlov’s dogs, Rebecca and Angela dropped whatever they were doing and ran outside. Some days the girls would play at our house. They dumped out all the dress-up clothes and created elaborate outfits. I gave them a tea party with hot chocolate and cupcakes and little sandwiches cut into heart shapes.
Every now and then while the girls played together, Lisa and I stood in her kitchen or out on the sidewalk visiting. Tim and I were pleased to discover that Lisa and her husband, David, while not Catholic, were Christians and attended an evangelical church. Lisa talked about doing the Lord’s will and raising children who love Jesus.
Whenever they played at Chelsea’s house, our girls came home with tales of Chelsea and Brittany’s superior toys. They had more videos than we do—lots of Disney videos, which we will not buy—and they could watch them any time they wanted. And Barbies. “Mom,” Angela breathlessly informed me one afternoon, “Chelsea and Brittany have hundreds of Barbies.”
We have no Barbies. Tim and I decided a long time ago that Barbie just encourages consumerism and an unhealthy preoccupation with clothing and body shape. “That’s nice,” I answered.
Another day Lisa drove the girls to the local drug store for some ice cream. Angela and Rebecca came home with their eyes as big as saucers. “Mom,” Rebecca told me, “Chelsea and Brittany have a TV in their car.”
“In their car?” I asked.
“In their car,” Rebecca said.
“We watched The Lion King,” Angela chimed in.
“Will we ever have a TV in our car?” Rebecca asked hopefully.
“No, sweetie,” I answered. “You get to watch videos on the weekend. We don’t need to watch any more TV. It turns your brain to mush.”
The more the girls played with Chelsea and Brittany, the more Tim and I grew concerned with the messages Rebecca and Angela were picking up at the house down the street. The Church calls us to reject the consumerism rampant in Western society. Our preoccupation with acquiring ever more and ever newer material possessions stands in the way of authentic human development. (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 28:2) Tim and I often explained to the girls that God cares about who we are and how we behave. We tell them he cares almost nothing about what kind of car we have or how fancy our clothes are. In the meantime, Chelsea and Brittany sang consumerism’s siren song.
One afternoon, I watched Chelsea sort through the stuffed animals stacked on the shelves in Rebecca and Angela’s room. Whenever Chelsea came to one of the smaller animals stuffed with little beans, she examined the tag. “This one is a real Beanie Baby,” she told Rebecca after looking at the tag on a striped snake. “This one isn’t.” She tossed a gray kitten to the side and continued with her inventory. “Real Beanie Baby, not a real Beanie Baby.” The “reals” were far outnumbered by the “nots.”
Rebecca looked puzzled. After Chelsea went home, Rebecca asked me about Chelsea’s distinctions. “I thought they were all Beanie Babies,” she said.
“They are,” I told her. I’d never really considered the distinction myself. “Some are just made by a certain company. Those are the ones Chelsea thinks are ‘real’ Beanie Babies. But they’re all Beanie Babies to us.”
Then came the playhouse. As Chelsea’s birthday approached, we heard the sound of construction every evening after Chelsea’s dad got home from work. Power saws whined late into the evening. One morning when I walked past Chelsea’s house on my way to the mail box, Lisa was cutting flowers in the front yard. I asked her about the construction. She wiped her brow and rolled her eyes. “David’s been building a playhouse for Chelsea’s birthday,” she said. I envisioned a little wooden shack. “The drywallers are coming this afternoon,” Lisa continued. “The electrician should be out some time tomorrow to do the wiring. I’m hoping we can get it carpeted and painted in time for her birthday.”
A few days later, Chelsea and Brittany gave Tim, Rebecca, and Angela a guided tour of the new structure. Tim laughed when he got home. “I’ve lived in apartments that were smaller,” he told me. The first time the girls got to play in the playhouse, Chelsea locked Rebecca out and played inappropriate doctor games with Angela.
“Where was Chelsea’s mom when all this was going on?” I asked Rebecca.
“She was inside on the phone.”
At that point, Tim and I agreed in retrospect, we should have said something to the girls’ parents. But the moment passed and instead we made some new rules for playing with Chelsea and Brittany. “You can play at our house or you can ride bikes back and forth and play in the front yards,” we told Rebecca and Angela. “You may not play inside the house or in the playhouse.”
“Why not?” Rebecca whined.
“There’s not enough supervision,” I said.
Even with the new rules, each time Rebecca and Angela played with Chelsea and Brittany, something happened that Tim and I didn’t like. Chelsea and Brittany lied about taking some of our toys. They ignored Tim’s and my requests to clean up or share. One day Angela came into the house after playing with Brittany and called her little sister Lucy a “butthead.”
“Angela,” Tim said sternly. “Where did you hear that word? We don’t use that word around here.”
“From Lucy,” Angela lied.
“Lucy doesn’t know that word,” Tim said. “Where did you hear it?”
“From Rebecca.”
“She did not!” Rebecca yelled from the other room.
“From Brittany,” Angela finally admitted.
As we adjusted to our new surroundings, our girls’ circle of friends grew. We enrolled Rebecca in a solid, Catholic children’s day camp at the beginning of the summer. For five days, she got to be around kids from families with values similar to ours. We planned more play dates with our Catholic friends and did more activities as a family so we’d be busy when Chelsea and Brittany came calling. Every late afternoon this summer, Tim took Rebecca, Angela, and Lucy to our local community pool to swim with another Catholic family.
Our efforts didn’t go unnoticed by Chelsea’s parents. By the end of the summer, David called his girls in every time we drove into our driveway. Tim and I felt bad. We are called by our faith to be witnesses to the truth contained and embodied in the Church (Redemptoris Missio 42). The Holy Father tells us that the very life of a Christian family is the first and irreplaceable form of evangelization. Tim and I feared that we merely confirmed David and Lisa’s suspicions about Catholics—that we’re insular and elitist. We’ve thought about talking to Chelsea’s parents about our reasons for limiting our girls’ contact with them. But there’s simply no polite way to say, “We think your children are a bad influence.”
This fall, Rebecca started first grade at a small Catholic academy near our house. Every day for over six hours she’s surrounded by kids with home lives similar to hers. We see a lot of the kids from her school at daily Mass. Now when Chelsea rides into our driveway and rings her bell, Rebecca and Angela usually stay right where they are.