I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers (10 page)

 

1.
To change the toilet paper roll.

2.
To throw away empty cartons of milk or juice. They leave one swallow and put them back in the refrigerator.

3.
To use a coaster.

4.
To apply sunscreen
before
going out.

5.
To study for a test before the night before.

6.
To floss their teeth, put the cap back on the toothpaste, and squeeze the tube from the bottom.

7.
To turn the volume down—on anything.

8.
To wipe the crumbs off the kitchen counter after snacking.

9.
To put things back where they belong.

10.
To do things right the first time.

11.
To consider the long-term risks and benefits.

12.
To hug family members in public like they mean it.

13.
To be nice to the siblings they'll miss when they go to college.

14.
To get up for church on Sundays without complaint.

15.
To care about things that don't affect them personally.

16.
To fill the car with gasoline
before
the warning light comes on.

17.
To care for the dogs, cats, fish, ponies, hamsters, lizards, snakes, birds, rabbits, and every other creature, great or small, that they swore they would be
entirely responsible
for when begging their parents to adopt the animals in the first place.

 

I
'm an extremely orderly, organized person. I have always been like this. I wish I were a more spontaneous, fun person. I love to hang around people like that, but I'm just not naturally one of them. (I also wish I were five-foot-seven and had long, red, curly hair, but that's not going to happen either. That ship has sailed. I'm over it.) What I am is nauseatingly responsible. You can count on me. I have a calendar and Band-Aids in my purse. I'm almost never late. (If I am, dial 911 immediately. Something bad has undoubtedly happened.) In fact, I'm usually a tad early because I am slightly pessimistic by nature, so I always assume that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. I'm usually right, too. I believe that it's best to be prepared for … everything. I always have batteries, bottled water, liquor, chocolate, and another book to read. That's all I really need.

As you might expect, I keep a tidy house. (Notice I did not say
clean
. Clean is another matter entirely, I'm afraid—a state of nirvana that is impossible to attain if you live with teenagers.) Everything has a place in my house. I like it that way. Other, less orderly people who live here and complain about cleaning up are grateful for my neatness compulsion when they want something in a hurry—like an extra roll of toilet paper, batteries for the remote control, a piece of poster paper for a project due the next day, or a new toothbrush because theirs fell in the toilet. Nobody whines about Mama then, let me tell you.

Some people (who share my DNA) say I'm a neat freak. How is that a bad thing? I've had the same pair of scissors on my desk since I was fifteen years old. I'm not confessing a fetish for office supplies or anything kinky like that. I mention this so you will understand that, thanks to my orderly nature, I rarely lose anything. Unlike the teenagers who share my roof, I put things back where they belong. After using the duct tape, I am one of those people who pulls out a little extra on the roll and folds it over on itself so no one has to find the start when it's needed again. As far as I'm concerned, that's how civilized people behave. I do not like to return to sleep in a bed that has been left unmade all day long. It doesn't feel right to me. I sweep my front porch every morning so my door looks welcoming to friends and open for business. Also, despite the fact that our eighty-year-old house obviously needs some work and the yard is one short step above embarrassing, I'd be ashamed for people passing by to think nobody lives here. We love our house. We're just too broke and busy raising children to pay much attention to an endless list of repairs.

What do you think happens when you take a neat-freak mother and give her three ordinary, decidedly non-neat-freak teenagers?
Nothing good, let me tell you. My kids' rooms are almost more than I can stomach. Honestly, it makes me feel physically ill to walk in there. I feel lightheaded and a little nauseous. It's the same feeling I get when I pass a car accident on the highway. My kids' rooms are way, way beyond messy. I don't know how they stand it.

“How can you live like this?” I ask them all the time.

“We don't mind,” they always say with indifferent shrugs. “You should see our friends' rooms. They're much worse.”

“I don't think that's possible,” I reply.

I'm not sure I can do justice to the depths of their filth with a description in these pages, and I am pretty handy with adjectives. What human voluntarily lives in squalor? How can anyone get a moment's peace, comfort, or sleep in the midst of devastation? I swear to you that if we were robbed, I could not go in their rooms and tell if the thief had been in there looking for money or valuables. I would have no idea if anything was missing. That's because their rooms always look that way. I'd have to check the living room or my bedroom to reassure myself.

“Oh, thank goodness, officer, my mistake! We weren't robbed! It's just the normal mess!”

My teenagers' rooms look like they've been tossed by narcotics agents. Clothes literally litter the floor. It makes me feel short of breath just to open their doors and look in. When I walk through their rooms in the morning straightening, folding, turning lights off, putting things away, gathering glasses and garbage, picking up money found on the floor, moving expensive headphones, iPods, and other gadgets out of the path of their big feet, it never fails to infuriate me. I never get past it. I see thousands of dollars in clothing, technology, furniture, musical instruments, and other miscellaneous items tossed around with no regard for their well-being.
I'm convinced teenagers never really learn to value material possessions until they have to pay for them with money they earn themselves. Talk is cheap. Minimum wage speaks loudly. (When my older son worked his first real job as a summer lifeguard, he learned some good life lessons. When he cashed his first paycheck, I pointed out, “Son, you worked one hour to earn what you spend on one fast-food lunch.”)

My kids sometimes behave like spoiled rock stars who trash hotel rooms. No matter how many times I tell them not to eat in their rooms like animals in their stalls, I find half-eaten sandwiches, crackers, chips, and candy on tables and under beds in a sumptuous buffet for roaches. This food orgy for insects virtually guarantees a round of throwing up by any pet that roots out forbidden goodies left to ripen and rot.

I'm not one of those mamas who is willing to close the door and pretend the mess doesn't exist. I can't do it. I've tried. Our house is too small for that. Their messy rooms are on the ground floor, a can't-miss visual treat for any guest who walks in. It embarrasses me to death. When a guest asks to use the bathroom, I run ahead to make sure hand towels and soap are available and clean and that the sinks are free of toothpaste worms. Most importantly, I check to see that the toilets are flushed. Yes, indeed. I really have to see if my teenage children have remembered to flush the pee and poop. What a treat that is for me. As I've said on numerous occasions, I am way overeducated for my current position and seriously underemployed.

My teens know they aren't supposed to leave the house until their beds are made, their clean clothes are put away, and their rooms are tidied. So they do all that—after a fashion. Let's just say that they have low, low standards. Technically, they comply with
my demands. The sheets, blankets, and comforters are pulled up to the tops of the beds—loosely speaking. Of course, huge lumps remain in the beds where they've pulled the covers over dirty clothes, a book or two, a pair of socks, or, one time, the family cat (no kidding) that was sleeping under the covers. They clear off the surfaces of their furniture by shoving everything in drawers or simply stacking debris like firewood in one big pile rather than the usual series of small, overflowing heaps of rubbish. They never actually go through those piles to sort, throw things away, or put things away properly. Never.

“It's clean enough, Mom! You should see my friends' rooms! They're so much worse than mine! I've never even seen _____'s bed, and _____ doesn't even use hangers anymore. He just picks something to wear out of the pile in the bottom of the closet. It's pretty cool, actually.”

Most of all, I warn you like a first-timer at a horror movie: do not look under the bed of a teenager! I'm not worried about the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue you might find. I'm talking about the literal filth that hides there. It's a lot like a trip to the city dump. Old toys. Stray socks. Dust bunnies the size of prairie dogs. Hair clips. Petrified Easter and Valentine's candy. (It really is too old to eat. I tried that once in a chocolate emergency. Trust me on this.) Old test papers. Books. Ticket stubs. Golf and tennis balls. Loose change. (I usually find enough change to make me wonder who harvests the coins from fountains. Could I hire those people on a percentage basis to clean out under my kids' beds? I could invest that change. Why are my kids so contemptuous of change? They never seem to use it. I'm not too proud to spend change. I have been known to count out ten dollars in change in the movie ticket line. It doesn't make me very popular, but I get rid of a lot of nickels
and dimes that way. Money is money. It all spends the same.) I have also found half-eaten apples, my favorite hairbrush that one of my teens borrowed and never returned, and some completely unidentifiable brown globs of … I have no idea what. Katrina mold? Mushrooms? A shrunken head? A giant hairball? A mummified body part? There's no way to tell without a full crime-scene team to investigate.

When I finally reach the end of my rope with the under-the-bed mess, I rake it all out using a broom, a baseball bat, or a golf club—whichever is handiest. I would never stick my bare arm under one of my kids' beds. Anything could be hiding under those bedskirts. Bodies could be stashed there. After I rake the debris into a pile in the middle of the room, I bring two trash bags—one for actual garbage and the other for Goodwill. Then I hand those bags to the teenager who sleeps in that room and beat a hasty retreat to the sound of loud protests about the unfairness of that teen's lot in life. It would take about ten minutes to clean out under the bed properly. Naturally, that teenager spends at least fifteen minutes complaining about the job before finally tackling it.

Here's the thing that baffles me most. When the parent/teen wrangling is over, the dust has settled, and the rooms are finally clean (to my standards) and once again capable of supporting human life as we know it, don't you think that the teenagers who sleep there would do just about anything to avoid another you-have-to-clean-your-room battle by keeping them tidy? That seems like a logical reaction to me. I usually internalize life lessons fairly quickly, but I am sad to report that my teenagers have never learned the clean-room rule. It's as if neat-and-tidy is an unnatural state for teenagers' habitats. In just a few short days, the rooms usually return to their feral state. You can almost hear the jungle
noises. Grownups need a machete, a teenage guide, and a tetanus booster to walk through the rooms.

Maybe that's the point, now that I think about it. Nothing says “Do Not Enter” to a grownup better than a big, smelly mess.

 

1.
Year-old thank-you notes that were never mailed.

2.
Fast-food drink cup with mold growing on the lip.

3.
Long-lost pacifier in the air-conditioning vent.

4.
School forms that were never turned in, even though I stayed up until midnight filling them out.

5.
Candy stash of staggering proportions.

6.
Wads of cash stuffed into shoeboxes, as if my teens were secretly saving to pay off a future kidnapper.

7.
A drawerful of used-up ChapSticks and lip glosses with no useful value for humans.

8.
Hairy, unrecognizable former food products that looked like they belonged in a research facility.

9.
Enough plain old garbage to fill a Hefty lawn-and-garden bag.

10.
Clothing items outgrown at least three years ago.

11.
Chewed gum stuck to the bottom of the bed frame.

12.
Bloodied Band-Aids that were removed and slapped on to the nearest surface, the side of the shower stall, for example, rather than being thrown away in a sanitary manner.

13.
A Mother's Day card my son was forced to write at school but never actually gave me.

14.
A pirate's head cup containing a month's supply of daily vitamins, which I assumed my son had swallowed before leaving the breakfast table.

15.
The expensive silk tie my son borrowed from my husband to wear to a dance and subsequently used like kitchen twine to secure his overflowing backpack.

16.
The credit card I allowed my teen to swipe to fill his car with gas, now serving as a handy-dandy, easy-to-steal bookmark.

 

F
eeding hungry teenagers is similar to feeding wild animals at the zoo. I feel like I'm always throwing food over the fence in an attempt to fill up the animals. “Here you go!” I say, sliding a hot pizza onto the table. “No need to fight over it! There's more where that came from!”