I was a privileged mother of two when I began shoplifting

Angela Barnett would never have thought she was the type to steal from stores. But then she met a new group of friends.

“Just put it in the bottom of the buggy,” my friend hissed. “It’s only tea bags.”

They were PG Tips and I stashed all 100 of them underneath the baby bag full of wipes and nappies and with a thundering heart, paid for my milk, cheese, wine and bread and walked out of the store.

Next came a pair of sunglasses. “Put them on top of your head and walk out,” my friend suggested and her tone was impish, almost flirty. I dare you. Are you woman enough?

My husband and I had recently moved from New Zealand to California, US, and this woman was my new best friend. We were aligned on many things. We fed our toddlers organic food where possible. We found the most progressive pre-school to send them to and would volunteer our time. We bought from upcycled clothing stores. We went to drum circles with our babies. We both worked for a charity in the US helping teens from marginalised communities find a path to college.

But here was this hot 30-something mother of two daring me to shoplift.

I’d never been through the teenage filching phase, thanks to my temporary enrapture with Jesus from age 14 to 16. I had scoffed a few yoghurt raisins from the Pik n Mix at the supermarket in my twenties but after my friend was caught eating an apple in the crackers aisle by a security guard, I stopped. The potential humiliation of being caught and called a thief was a powerful deterrent.

Yet here I was, having already gotten away with the tea bags and I wanted to take the sunglasses. There was a thrill to it. My heart was thumping again.

We were in a secondhand clothing store and there were about twenty pairs of sunglasses scattered in a bowl. We had donated bags of clothing to them, so I justified it in my mind. I was doing my own upcycling of sorts. Give and take. I could probably give the sunglasses back in another bag of clothes and they wouldn’t notice.

The look on my friend’s face when I got in the car puffed me up. She was impressed I did it. I felt alive, interesting.

After the sunglasses was a bottle of wine. “It’s anti-capitalism,” my friend said as we hovered, whispering in Safeway, the largest supermarket chain in America. She'd voted for Obama. She must be right, I thought.

We weren’t alone. There were other mothers, a group who lived in San Francisco a couple of hours from us. Their tales were bolder than tea bags and second-hand sunglasses.

There was one woman who stole her child’s birthday cake every year from the supermarket. Her child was five at the time and each year the cake had gotten progressively larger. At the pinnacle of the birthday party the children would clap and guffaw over the size of the cake and the mothers (those in the know) would clap and guffaw over the size of the cake, wondering how the hell she continued to pull it off.

I won’t divulge how she did it because, actually, it was not anti-capitalism. It was using privilege in the worst way. We were white middle-class mothers so nobody suspected us of anything. If we had grown up having security guards chase us around stores based on the colour of our skin or quality of our clothing, we would never have dared. But I didn’t understand that then. I wanted to be in the cool group and my values were left trailing behind in the dust.

My partner was horrified. “You have to stop this,” he said, after the sunglasses. I didn’t tell him about the wine.

In a store in Mendocino, miles from where I lived, I was tempted to take a top because I could see how to do it. The hook was in me, that small seed of what. Addiction? Obsession? Stupidity? Madness?

Close to 40 and what was I doing?

I was being a bad mother, a bad example but it didn’t feel that way. It felt exciting. For a moment I did something wilder than wipe bottoms and hit drums while singing about wheels on the bus.

I don’t remember taking anything else while we lived in California but I do remember the last time I shoplifted. We had moved back to Aotearoa, and I was with my old friends, ones who had known me since my early 20s. We too had aligned values with how we treated each other, our views of the world and what we thought was OK and not OK. Or we thought we did.

We were in an avant-garde boutique in Auckland, with items being flung in and out of changing rooms faster than a bat out of hell. My friend bought a fringed jacket, another got a green jumpsuit and when they were paying, I was standing by a bowl of rings. They weren’t expensive but they were glorious. I slipped one on my middle finger and felt the old thrill. The rush. Should I? Could I? I could.

Once well clear of the store I told my friends what I had done, thinking they would laugh like the mothers in California.

They looked at me like I was a stranger.

“Hand it over,” demanded the one with the fringed jacket. We were walking through a city suburb and I watched as she flung it far over a hedge and into somebody’s garden. We didn’t even hear it land.

“Imagine if you got caught?” they said. They reminded me of Winona Ryder, who at the time had not redeemed herself after her shoplifting spree in the early 2000s. This was well before Stranger Things.

But it wasn't just that, they wanted to know what I was doing and who had I become.

I could see in their eyes what I had forgotten at the time.

Shoplifting is not cool or badass. It’s for the arrogantly privileged or the terribly desperate. Or the lost. It can quickly become a dirty compulsion.

Immediately I wanted to reverse the act and tell my friends I was still all the other things they thought about me.

But there it was. My secret laid bare. It didn’t feel intoxicating anymore, as it had in California with the other mothers applauding. It felt grubby and shameful. I’m grateful my old friends pulled me up on it so quickly, so the shame burned brightly but only with them. Fortunately for me, they reminded how reckless and risky it was without the whole world knowing.

“Get your kicks another way,” one of them suggested. “Go paragliding.”

A year later I went back into the store and bought a ring. I wanted to tell them why, but couldn’t.

Recently, I asked my teenagers about shoplifting and they said, "everyone goes through a phase". But they were referring to their own age group. "Adults should know better," they said.

They’re right. But sometimes adults do stupid things. My thieving phase was over a decade ago and I am not proud of this brief period in my life. I’m not justifying it. And I'm not professing to know or understand why other people shoplift – everyone will have vastly different reasons.

But I’m sharing this to say, Me Too. Because I can’t imagine how lonely it must feel to be caught and savagely judged. Especially when you live in the spotlight.

Angela Barnett is a writer and the founder of Pretty Smart, an organisation that promotes body confidence in teenagers.