The Client purchased, in August of 2020, a set of six reusable lunch containers — silicone-lidded, BPA-free, of a brand the Client described to the Journal as "the moderate-expensive ones, not the cheap ones, not the rich-person ones." By February of 2021, the household possessed two. The fate of the other four was the matter at hand.
Initial inquiry, conducted by the Client over breakfast on a Thursday, produced the following testimony from the Respondent, who was twelve at the time. The containers, the Respondent said, were "in my backpack." Pressed on which compartment, the Respondent allowed they "might be at school." Pressed on whether she had seen them at school, she stated — with what we will charitably call inferential reasoning — that "they probably were."
A Doctrine of Recurrent Negligence
The Journal, in evaluating this matter, was drawn to what we will term the doctrine of recurrent negligence — that pattern of household conduct in which a single category of failure recurs across a sufficient interval that it ceases, doctrinally, to be negligence and becomes something closer to a tacit policy. The Respondent had not returned a lunch container in two consecutive weeks. The Respondent had not returned a lunch container in four consecutive weeks. The Respondent had not returned a lunch container in a calendar quarter. At what point, the Journal was asked, does this cross from negligence into something like settled habit?
Settled habit is a useful framing here. It carries the resonance of unconscious patterned behavior — the conduct one engages in without deciding to engage in it. The Respondent's failure to return lunch containers had achieved this status. She did not, at the moment of leaving school for the bus, consider the question whether to retrieve the lunch container. The question did not arise. The container, by twelve-year-old neurology, ceased to exist at the moment lunch ended. Some hours later it might be remembered. By then, the Respondent was several miles distant from the container, and the container had begun whatever process containers go through in the bottom of school lockers over the course of evenings.
The Replacement Cycle
The Client had, by the time of the consultation, instituted what she called the replacement cycle. Each Sunday evening, she audited the kitchen drawer in which the lunch containers were kept. If the count was below four, she added one or two from a stash she had accumulated in the laundry room. By February the stash was nearly depleted. The Client was, she said, "in the position of either buying more containers or eating the loss."
The Journal observed that the Client's situation was structurally indistinguishable from that of a small business absorbing inventory shrinkage. The lunch container, like the small-electronics inventory of a corner store, simply went missing at a stable rate that the Client could neither prevent nor recover. The retail-economics analogy was, the Client acknowledged, "depressing but accurate."
The doctrinal question was whether the Respondent's conduct constituted negligence in the household-tort sense — a failure of ordinary care producing recoverable damages — or whether the pattern had ripened into something requiring a different category altogether. We were inclined toward the latter view. The Respondent's failure was not, on close inspection, attributable to a single lapse of attention; it was the byproduct of an entire afternoon's worth of attention being directed elsewhere, week after week, with the regularity of a calendar feature. Calling this "negligence" felt, doctrinally, too generous. We had considered the term "willful inattention" before discarding it as judgmental. We settled, in our internal notes, on the more clinical formulation: "non-arising consideration."
Disposition
The matter was resolved in March, by the simple expedient of the Respondent's school locker being cleaned out by the building staff at the end of the second-quarter term. The Client received an email from the school's vice principal asking whether she would like to collect "approximately three lunch containers" found in the locker, "in various states." The vice principal had thoughtfully sealed the containers, each in its own zip-top bag, prior to the Client's arrival. The Client collected them. Two were salvageable. One had become, in the vice principal's word, "biome." The Client did not press for further detail. She did, on the drive home, roll down the car windows.
The replacement cycle was suspended in the spring; it resumed by midsummer, by which point the containers were down to two again. The Client has, she tells us, made her peace. She has also, the Journal has been given to understand, begun purchasing the cheap ones.