***THIS IS MY POST FOR TRIANGLE MOM2MOM...THE SITE FOR WHICH I AM A WEEKLY CONTRIBUTOR***
I just thought you might enjoy it and didn't want to make you click on a link to get there. It's Saturday after all.
When I was a young teen, I thought my Mom had it made. I mean, what a life of leisure!!! She had two live-in indentured servants to do everything. We washed dishes. We dusted. We vacuumed. At one point I remember Mom saying, "You know, it really would be easier to just do it myself." Ha! I laughed.
I am now a Mom of teens and I am here to tell you...she was right!!! It really would be easier to do it myself. It seems that there is a generation gap when it comes to household chores. If you went into my kitchen right now, you would see that the countertops are free of the detritus of our lives, lacking the items tossed upon it when we arrive home and bereft of crumbs and coffee cup rings. It's like that because I cleaned it. I know what clean looks like.
This is typical of how the kitchen looks after my daughter "cleans" it:
She sees it as "clean," I see it as justifiable homicide!
"Pick up the family room," the Mom said. A simple task. In my mind it clearly communicates that if something is where it shouldn't be, PICK IT UP AND PUT IT WHERE IT SHOULD BE! This picture was taken after my son theoretically "picked up the family room."
Clearly, no family room would be complete without an athletic cup, a gum wrapper and a pencil on the ottoman with the remote.
If you read last week's entry about my husband and Costco, you know that we have lots of back-up supplies of everything. So we don't really have to worry about running out. But somehow, it made sense to someone to return this to the refrigerator:
You really never know when someone is going to be thirsting for an eighth of a cup of cranberry juice!
What we have here is a failure to communicate. Or is it a failure to listen? I'm opting for the latter since I am nothing if not articulate.
Can anyone out there offer me some options that don't involve violence? Can someone tell me how to NOT take this personally? With every gum wrapper I find on the floor, what I hear is, "I can't be bothered to bend down and pick that up...Mom will do it." This may be the most demanding job I've ever had. It's certainly the most demeaning! And without a doubt, it's the lowest paying!
Di
That's the kicker, isn't it. It's not so much that they don't clean up, it's that they don't clean up because THEY KNOW THAT YOU WILL! (I'm not a mom, but I'm a wife, which amounts to much the same thing.) And they're right, we will, because we have a lower mess-threshold than they do. I wish I had advice, but all I can offer is commiseration.
Posted by: raych | April 26, 2008 at 11:28 AM