More on Chores
Monday, February 13th 2012 @ 3:50 AM
Me: “I’m not perfect. Does that surprise you?”
Child: “That’s okay, Mom; I’m making up for it.”
Most regularly, my sons and daughters “make up for it” in the domestic department. Their record is nearly flawless when it comes to their lack of enthusiasm about chores. Short of cleansing monsoons or of the introduction, to our household, of service bots, it remains unlikely that either their private domains or our shared spaces will get straightened up without a little of my nudging.
I tell myself that in providing my children with well-defined tasks, I am enabling them to glean life skills and to feel increased self-esteem as well as am saving myself from scaling Mt. Laundry all by my lonesome. Yet, I am becoming increasingly unconvinced that my strategy has long term usefulness.
My not-so-acne-marked, trigonometry-obsessed cohorts have less interest in taking out the trash than they do in counting the fillings in the closest camel. No, I rescind that remark; the kids like alpacas and llamas and, would, it follows, probably be willing to stick their heads in the mouth of any ship-of-the-desert. On the other hand, they run from the chance to sponga our floor.
Accordingly, I’m as impotent today, as I was last decade, about getting those boys and girls keyed up about the lint trap in our dryer, or about the snails that need to be hand gathered and relocated, humanely of course, from our mirpesset garden. In addition to continuing on powerless over their lack of excitement about locating the floors in their rooms, I can’t seem to get them to be markedly motivated about sweeping behind our sofas, either. It’s not so much that the dust bunnies breeding throughout our home deters them as it is that the specter of my wanting them to clean up again, if they succeed once, haunts them.
Thus, my crew insists that disposable plates exist so dishes don’t have to be washed…ever. Likewise, they see little benefit in vacuuming under the diningroom table, or in completing any other household job that will have to be repeated the next day, the next week, the next month, or the next season.
In spite of that, those same boys and girls carry on ceaselessly when they want to redecorate my kitchen, I mean bake cookies. When they recognize that I’m preoccupied moving paragraphs around texts, they descend on my office, knowing that at such times, I’m more likely to agree to their plan to enter, to create, and to abandon, than if they sought my permission when I was thinking about such topics clearly.
Truth is, I could look past the overflowing hampers, at least for another five minutes. I could even make allowance for the tears and slammed doors that frequently accompany my admonishments to empty such vessels. I am unable, however, to cast a blind eye to kitchen counters covered with flour or to floor tracked with melted chocolate. Moms have limits.
Kids do, too. They forget their most recent encounters with yeast and confectionary sugar and appeal over and again to me to grant them access to our cookie cutters and to our rolling pins. No matter how many times we’ve rounded this particular bush, those lights of my life, expect me to accommodate their whims.
They depend on me to be compassionate notwithstanding how many sacks of potatoes they’ve left in plastic bags in sunny rooms, and regardless of how much they complain, days later, when we possess nothing suitable with which to prepare fries. They rely on me to jump into our car to retrieve more spuds, since they regard themselves as “bereft little darlings, innocent of natural consequences.” They forget that it would be much savvier, during such goings on, to offer me hugs, to make me herbal tea, or to clean our toilets. Worse, they seem shocked when I refuse to interrupt a letter to a publisher or a response to a reader in order to make a quick trip to the makolet for their starchy plant tubers.
Consider, please, that my offspring are old enough, being people in their teens and twenties, to prepare comestibles that call for no potatoes, to wash pots, to load the dishwasher, and to wipe the table. They are sufficiently grown up, too, to prepare enough food for other family members, to return perishables to the refrigerator when they are done cooking, and to turn of all of the kitchen lights. However, when I call their attention to such facts, they suddenly crave only green salad and raw nuts and ask me why I am not penning my next novel.
The economy of housework reduces longings better than does any diet or fiduciary shortcoming. The microwave can and does replace the mama under such constraints and the dry goods cabinet, unlike Yours Truly doesn’t aver the falseness of their complaints. As soon as they fasten on the utility of boiling water, I no longer have to abandon my flash fiction about Komodo dragons, or my poetry about midlife body changes.
Nonetheless, during such instances, on the other side of my office wall, elbows and packages of rice cake go flying. I shout to my darlings to both keep their volume down and to wash the can opener before they leave our kitchen. I’m no longer positioned to sooth and to reassure; I want them sated, but I want them sated quietly.
As I ease into a couplet, I delude myself that my sons and daughters might remember to suds their utensils and then to put away our freshly washed towels. I fantasize, too, that when stumbling upon the towers of library books in the living room those kids might decide to trek down the hill to the library. The, again, they might not. A mother can dream.
