The Difference Between Boys and Girls, Part I

I'm dashing off to my exercise class, leaving the almost 16-year-old watching the almost 12-year-old. They know the rules: on this particular day of the week they have to do three chores each. These chores are pretty well established and, considering how sloppily the kids do them, easily done. Stainless steel, toilets, vacuuming, mirrors, countertops.

As I run out I say to Daughter, "No TV or computer until you do your three chores!" There's no reply, which, in retrospect, seems ominous. But I do hear a final click of her hands on the keyboard.

I finish my exercise class, get in my car and call home. Daughter answers. I ask, "What chores did you do?" I'm genuinely curious. I'm optimistic, upbeat, expecting a list in response. Maybe a list of the easiest stuff she could do, but a list nonetheless.

She says, "I didn't watch TV or go on the computer."

"So?"

"So I didn't do any chores."

I take a deep breath, not wanting to scare anyone in the parking lot I'm in by yelling loudly. I ask her to put Bar Mitzvahzilla on the phone. Although by now I'm expecting the worst, I ask him the same question, "What chores did you do?"

"Stainless steel, toilets and vacuuming. Can I go? I'm watching TV?"

Ah, the differnce between boys and girls. Part I.

Ever had this sneaky over-interpretation of your instructions happen with your kids? Ever wish you had just a little more time to lay out exactly what you want them to do ahead of time, with all the possible caveats so that there are no loopholes?

Linda Pressman,
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Books-a-Million, Powells, at Changing Hands, on Kindle and in libraries.

Daughter vs. the Wall

Lately Daughter's been on a cleaning spree. Not of our kitchen island, on which she has scattered arts and crafts supplies and anything and everything she could dump on there. Not of our family room where she has snuck plates, wrappers, cups, and cans, treating "her chair" in the middle of the room like it's her private garbage can, while not having anything actually make it into a garbage can.

Instead, she's suddenly started cleaning out her room. First she had an idea, which she presented to me and Husband in compelling detail: her room is too small and we need to take the wall down between it and the room next door. She had some drawings handy for how this would be accomplished, had chosen paint colors, and had a white board showing the eventual placement of her futon (she doesn't actually have a futon) and her walk-in closet (ditto). Every morning during my recent illness, the first thing I saw when I cracked my eyes open was Daughter standing at the foot of my bed with her white board and easel, ready to provide me with a detailed presentation on the subject. And, by any chance, do I happen to have the blueprints for our house laying about? 

Husband expressed some doubt that she could actually keep a space twice as large clean. "Let's see you clean up the room you've got and then we'll talk about it," he said.

His statement, I'm sure, is what triggered the cleaning frenzy.

This is how our lives were before: once a year or so, Daughter would lure me into her room on some pretense, I'm not sure what, and I'd find myself still sitting there about two days later sorting through junk, Daughter by my side and two gigantic bags nearby - one for giveaway and one for garbage. We'd slowly move through the room until it was clean, or at least vacuumable.

But Daughter, in her present cleaning frenzy, is handling things differently. She is slowly divesting herself of everything in the room, till now it resembles a prison cell or nun's chamber. Basically, there's a bed in there.  She's emptied out her dresser, one whole side of her closet, packed away some chairs she once loved, and has told me she doesn't need her bookshelves anymore. Or books.

I'm unsure of what's exactly going on here. Is she moving out? Because she's only eleven. I'm all for the kids moving out but I had kind of thought they'd wait till they got through middle school.

Husband thinks he can hold her off, keep setting new and more miserable cleaning tasks for her, trying to avoid the home renovation issue, the big daughter/small room issue. But I know what's going to happen. With Daughter's indomitable will, once she's done with her emptying, she'll take down that wall herself.

Do you ever recognize a will stronger than your own in your child or children? Messy kids? Determined kids?

Room of Doom

In an act that I can only blame on menopausal hormones, about two years ago I got rid of my cleaning people. Sure, I had my reasons. It was a husband/wife team and the husband used to creepily follow me around while I got ready for my exercise class in the morning. Then I'd get home after they were gone, lift up the ottoman in the family room, and find out that they'd shoved a bunch of junk under there. Was it them or was it hormones?

Either way, they were gone. I was sure I could handle it myself. I have two big strapping children and a  helpful husband, right?

Now, looking back, I want to kick myself with this insane thinking. Husband was once in the mindset that a cleaning crew was necessary our existence. I mean, he had one before I met him! Before I fired them Husband had no idea that wives actually could clean houses. Now? No longer.

So that leads me to this week and the Hannukah party I'm having here on Sunday. And the absolute ruin I live in.

Since I can't really handle all the mess in all the rooms at once, I've worked out a method over these last two years of being the housecleaner. I call it Room by Room, similar to Anne LaMott's Bird by Bird. I only tackle one room at a time. I don't get sidetracked. And one caveat: once I'm done with that particular room,  Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter aren't allowed to walk into it again until the party is over. Even if it's, like, their bathroom and there are three days till the party. Go to the neighbor's house.

Now I know I've got five days still but right now our house is basically a tear down and I need to use my time wisely. So I plan to start with the rooms no one uses at all, like the dining room, my art room (haven't used that in awhile), the den (where I can easily clean around Bar Mitzvahzilla sitting frozen staring at the TV screen with only his thumbs moving on his Xbox controller), and my office (thank goodness for my months-long writer's block!)

The rooms we really live in - the family room and kitchen - I have to treat carefully. I can't completely move the kids out, right? And once they're cleaned I don't want to be chasing the kids around and watching each cookie crumb fall to the floor with a wild-eyed look in my eye. So I'll hold off on that and use the kids wisely. Have them do their own rooms. I'll assign chores to them that will be done badly, all in a mad, crazed dash to get to whatever's been promised them in return for those chores.

Then, in one last herculean effort, I'll unclutter the rest of the house and move every last piece of remaining junk, by putting it all into my bedroom - the Room of Doom. Then I'll blockade the door so no one can get in there.

When I greet my guests on Sunday night, our house will look like a house that actual human beings live in. I'll  demur when the few people who've never seen the house before ask for a tour that includes my bedroom (Sorry! It's kind of messy right now!) and then wait for the inevitable outcome of the Hannukah party: a destroyed house. Wrapping paper everywhere, food sloshed and dropped, ground into the floors, babies running and drooling.

And then I'll clean it again. Maybe in time for next Hannukah.

Do you clean just to let things get messed up again or leave them messy and clean afterwards? Do you have a method for cleaning? Do you have cleaning people or do it yourself? Ever have one "Room of Doom" where everything bad is hidden?

Roommates of Doom

Did you ever have a roommate who drove you nuts?

When I went to college, I went through seven roommates my freshman year. This wasn't all my fault. In the prison block of my first college dormitory, we were assigned to four-person, two-bunkbedded rooms, one bunkbed on each side of the room, a bank of four closets in the middle, and a strip of four built-in desks on the opposite wall. With that many people in a room the minute I switched rooms once I automatically had six roommates. Then the minute one those subsequent roommates switched I was at seven. It was hard not to take this personally.

After all, I had roommates who bordered on evil, some who were criminal, and some who were just plain loony.  There was one who switched bunks with me while I was away for the weekend, though just to creep me out she placed my artwork upside down next to my new bunk. Eventually, when I went away again, she moved me out into another room. I had a roommate who used to wake up our entire room with blasting Gospel exhortations to accept Jesus or burn. Every night for dinner she ate dry ramen, crunching it silently at her desk. I tried to explain to her that you were supposed to cook it, and offered her the use of my hot pot, but she just looked at me silently and kept crunching. I had a spoiled roommate who was so rich that hundred-dollar bills used to fall out of the Calvin Klein jeans she left strewn all over the floor of the room, all while I was subsisting on knock-off cans of corn. I had trampy roommates, virginal roommates, and, later, I had some roommates who were fascinated by my houseplants and plant light, so much so that they then bought their own plant light and started a pot farm in their room.

So I had some bad roommates. But I'm starting to wonder if these roommates, my children, are the worst roommates I've ever had. 

My husband and I walk in the kitchen one evening. The cabinets are flung open, measuring spoons out, microwave door wide, wrappers on the counter. I think, Where are the kids? Are they okay? Because, of course, based on the condition of the house, I think there's been a burglar in there.

But no. They both simply made some fudgy thing that had to be microwaved and needed a measuring spoon to do it, and they had to unwrap some packaging. And they're just that bad of roommates that they grab what they need and simply drop the rest of the stuff where ever they are. Lift a finger to throw the wrapper in the garbage can? No, of course not. Swing an arm to shut the cabinet door? Lift a hand to put away the measuring spoons? C'mon.

When I look at these roommates of mine - the fourteen-year-old and the ten-year-old - I feel a little hopeless. The fact that they can make a mess and then sit in it - what does this say for their future? The fact that somehow, unlike my other roommates, all their actions not only reflect on me but have to be fixed by me, this is bad.

But so far one thing to be grateful for: no pot farm.

Did you ever have a bad roommate? Did you ever have a really great one? Did you live in a prison cell dorm at college like I did? What kind of "roommates" are your kids?

Lazy Mom On The Rise

Eventually even extremely lazy, hot, menopausal mothers must rise and notice what's going on in the house.

The kids were strangely silent on Saturday morning. I got to sleep late because they managed not to fight over something which would necessitate coming into my room in the middle of a fistfight. I got up, quizzed them about exactly what they were eating that didn't require any cooking or milk, since they were eating in the den (chips for breakfast?) and then got ready for my day. Since Bar Mitzvahzilla was having a friend come over at 1:00, suddenly my brain began working. I thought: den. They're in the den. That didn't make sense. I had shoved all the extra rugs and giveaway clothes in the den the other day, blocking the couch and the TV set, so how were the kids in there?

So I rose from my side of the house, kind of like one of the presidents coming alive on Mount Rushmore - a rumbling, ominous, earthquake kind of sound - and went to investigate. Of course. They had just thrown everything on the ground - unrolled the rugs, scattered the clothes - all in a desperate urge to get near the TV set.

This resulted in the dreaded event: Mom's deep cleaning. I had the kids coming in and out of the room like that broomstick in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, back and forth, just shoveling garbage out of there. I then made the mistake of lifting the ottoman, where I found a time capsule of my children's meals of the past month.

My kids hate when I clean because when I do it I only do it like a lunatic, with a vacuum cleaner hose as a lasso, and holsters packed with Windex and Comet. I have no half way point. And whenever I do that, instead of just quietly helping, like that nice Sorcerer's Apprentice broomstick, they go existential on me. They say, "Why are you doing this, Mom? Why does it matter so much to clean?" or "Why is it so important that you clean this room, Mom?" Like maybe I should call on the spirit of Albert Camus so I could realize that a dirty room filled with food and garbage is really just a matter of my perception of reality.

So they pushed the lazy mom too far. Now food is banned from the den. They're waiting for me to cave on this but every time I walk past the den and see it so clean and remember crawling around with the hose attachment cleaning up crumbs from under the couch cushions, I think, No.

Things On My Mind

Here are the things on my mind today:

1) I just browbeat both of my children into going to sleepaway camp this summer. The son was pitching nasty fits about it all week when I finally sat him down and said, "You're going. That's it. No further discussion. Dad and I have made an executive decision." And he shut up. You'd think I was sending him to military school.

2) Jazzercise. (I've always got Jazzercise on my mind...)

3) My Mother's Who Write class is ending. I haven't even had a chance to be nervous about the reading coming up this Saturday because I'm still working on the final piece. Topic: Endings. I am so glad that I finally left my house and became part of this community of women writers. It was very lonely writing before!

4) I'm growing out my eyebrows. This is scary because when I was 13 I had a unibrow, so there is the potential for a Wolfman Jack kind of look. Right now they just look like I forgot to tweeze.

5) I am now officially the Blog Editor for Poetica Magazine, but now I'm terrified to post my first blog entry. Typical.

6) This 6-month experiment husband and I have had of cleaning our house ourselves hasn't worked out very well. At this point, we need an entire cleaning team. Things are getting punchy around here.

7) I'm thinking seriously about cooking husband some meals before we hit our 20th anniversary. Sometimes I feel very, very sorry for him, being married to a wife like me. Let's put it this way: my neighborhood friends are starting to offer to bring meals for him.

That's where things stand today. Random blogbits.

Nanny 602

In the middle of my children's Spring Break week, the stomach flu hit our house. Here's what happened. First I left the house knowing my daughter had a stomach ache. I knew my husband would be home, but it turns out he came home and stayed in the garage fixing the outside refrigerator. Daughter comes out, tells him she's thinks she's going to be ill, so he sends her in to the bathroom but she doesn't make it there.

I get home and because I'm the mom and the dad is spending hours outside trying to fix a sixteen year old refrigerator I start cleaning. Well, first there's the mopping. Then I get to throw away the rugs daughter destroyed. Then there's the sponge-mopping with anticeptic cleaner, then there's the crawling around and cleaning all the collateral damage. Then there's the nursing.
The next day I have it. The day after that, son, a.k.a. Bar Mitzvahzilla, has it. Today I feel a little punchy again but I must have gained a little immunity from all the cleaning of all these years of being a parent because they definitely get it worse than me.

But for 4 days I am laying on my bed, which is apparently the only place my kids can convalesce, with a sick kid - first one and then the other, and then the well one who feels like he or she is being ignored so they have to pile on too, and then the husband because no one's in the rest of the house so it's like the sun has moved from its spot in the sky. But we're looking for something to watch on TV and we watch Nanny 911 twice - which I've never seen before - and I'm chagrined to find that I'm every woman, so to speak. I'm not exactly those women, but there are certain similarities, things I'm not proud of, things that Nanny would give me a stern talking to about and a swift Mary Poppins kick in the behind about if she descended on my house.

In the first show the mom was a perfectionist, unable to enjoy her children because she was so busy nagging them about cleaning up, about all the stuff they were leaving out, destroying, etc. Check. The second time I watched the mom wanted the kids to be independent and grow up yet kind of didn't; she wanted them to glom onto her, to need her enough that she would kind of ruin their relationship with the dad so she could make herself the most-loved parent. Checkmate.

Well. I kind of wish I had just left the station on HGTV. Decorating I can handle, but here was my life, my glaring errors up in front of me. Have I walked through the house noticing only what has been left undone? Have they cleaned and then had me wondering why there was still filth everywhere? Have I created a close relationship with my kids at my husband's expense? I never have these kinds of revelations after watching Househunters.

So without Nanny coming to visit, without Nanny 602, so to speak, coming to visit Arizona, I've seen myself in the face of every mother who's ever slipped and slided. I'm good at this in so many ways, but surely I can bring the things I'm bad at up a level, at least to "fair."