I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers (9 page)

Every day, I wade through an overwhelming pile of laundry thrown to the bottom of the basement stairs by my middle child in his one backbreaking (just ask him—I once caught him researching child labor laws on the Internet—like I care about that) morning chore. First, I separate the clothes by color. I even have a “special needs” pile that requires serious, up-close-and-personal attention. This is the moment when experienced mamas like me really shine. You wouldn't expect a sweet young mama to successfully remove a stain caused by blue Slushy, ground-in grass, and bicycle-chain grease. You need a battle-hardened, mean mama like me, a woman who is not afraid to spray harsh chemicals that come with warning labels that suggest blood tests every three months to check for liver damage.

Out of the kindness of my heart, I wash the clothes, fold them, place them in individual baskets
that have my children's names on them
(there was a week or so when I thought that was going to work), and deliver them upstairs to my kids' rooms at the end of each and every day. For this work, I think I should be nominated for sainthood. I'd be a shoo-in. The pope would put me on the fast track, for sure. I'd blow by the beatification requirement. I
have amassed an impressive body of work. I think my kids should thank me on bended knee for all those clean clothes. It would also be nice if they wrote me thank-you notes, which would be especially meaningful if they included cash. I think it would be a smart move by my children if they kissed me on my cheek at least once a month and told me how much they love me and appreciate their clean clothes. I'd like that even better than cash. Don't worry. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that little fantasy to come true.

The little rodents do
not
appreciate their clean clothes or
anything else
I do for them on a regular basis. That's the nature of the beast. We didn't fully appreciate what our mothers did for us either, not until we were parents ourselves. Now, I think there should be a statue in my mother's honor at the very least, or maybe an airport named for her. It's not possible to appreciate your parents when you're still a teenager, and that is a crying shame. I hope that in retrospect, when they're grown and doing their own laundry and hopefully are not in prison, my kids will remember some of the sacrifices I made for them and be grateful. I hope they call me on the phone and tell me about that in elaborate detail while I sip on a cocktail and chuckle to myself. That could happen, right? Wouldn't it be fabulous?

Today, however, I'm a little worked up about the laundry. I feel like raising a big stink. And by the way, if I didn't do all the laundry every single day that rolls around—including national holidays and times when I'm sick, tired, or have way more fun things to do or work deadlines piled up on my calendar—there would be a literal stink in this house that you simply cannot imagine unless you have personally gotten a whiff of football uniforms left to marinate in the car for a few days in the middle of August in Alabama. I
think a highly effective interrogation technique would be to shove those sweaty uniforms under the noses of suspected terrorists. I guarantee they'd cough up the WMD locations. Nothing is more pungent. In comparison, being sprayed by a skunk is a sashay by the perfume counter at the mall. Diaper pail fumes are a walk in a rose garden in June compared to the smell of sweat-soaked football girdles. I have gagged many, many times when loading my washing machine. It's a humbling experience.

Teenagers really do stink, you know. It's not just metaphorically true. There is nothing as low as the moment you have to tell your newly hairy teenager to take a shower because the B.O. is knocking you down. Of course, as soon as they figure that out—and as soon as they are interested in members of the opposite sex—they suddenly become the cleanest people on the planet. Two or three showers a day are common. They take their time in the shower, too. They make sure to use up every last drop of hot water and every ounce of your expensive spa products (the ones they gave you for Mother's Day). In fact, the more the shampoo or body wash costs, the more they use or leave upside down in the tub to slowly drain away. Money is no object to teenagers—as long as it is your money, of course. Their money is another matter entirely, one I address in another chapter right here in this book. Teenagers don't care about other people's showers. They don't even care if a sibling needs to get in that bathroom to throw up. They certainly do not care about your water bill. One of my kids was quite shocked to learn that residents are actually billed for water usage. I think he believed free water was guaranteed in the Bill of Rights somewhere.

This is the point where soak meets the spin cycle in this teenage laundry story. Do you think that my teenagers take those perfectly folded, beautifully ironed, pristine clothes and immediately,
joyfully, and with genuinely grateful hearts put them away in their drawers and closets? Of course not! It seems like such a reasonable expectation to me—logical, too. I can tell you right now that if someone were saintly enough to wash my clothes, fold them, iron them, hang them, and return them to my own personal bedroom, I would have no difficulty whatsoever in completing the arduous task of putting them away properly. How hard can it be? It takes just a few minutes a day, tops. It's a job they could do while texting on their cell phones. We all know how crucial that is to their continuing to live and breathe.

Big theatrical sigh here. With teenagers, the obvious almost never happens. My teens go to great lengths to avoid simple compliance even when it would be good for them, too. They get to wear the unwrinkled clothes, after all. It becomes a test of wills that eventually results in an ultimatum from me:
“You cannot leave this house until you put those clothes away!”
All of that drama is so unnecessary! It's silly—like killing a roach with a bunker-buster bomb. I have been known to ask, “Really? This is necessary? I have to threaten you to get you to hang your clothes up?”

Here's what teenagers do best: They back you into a corner until you hear ridiculous things come out of your mouth that sound like your own mother. They make you so weary of the whole subject that you want to roll your eyes, too. They wear you down. It's a pretty good strategy, one used historically by outnumbered and under-equipped guerrilla fighters in small insurrections around the globe. Eventually, wandering bands of tribal clans wore out the Russian army in Afghanistan. It works. Sometimes, the big dogs simply give in to get past the issue already, whatever the cost.

Teens prefer to rifle through the clean laundry basket over the course of a week or so, fishing out favorite clothing items on an
as-needed basis. After all the selecting and discarding, the previously folded clothing items resemble a basket of rags used to wash the car. I call this behavior the I'd-rather-live-out-of-a-laundry-basket-than-do-what-Mom-said choice. It's classic teenager. These are people who will happily cause themselves great inconvenience if by doing so they can make you suffer, too. It's a control thing.

The worst behavior in my household is so egregious it makes me feel slightly nauseated just writing about it. I am not making this up. I couldn't. I'm not that imaginative. On a regular basis, my children go to the trouble of transferring neatly folded piles of laundry on their beds to any other surface—the floor, a chair, or a desk—so they can sleep comfortably undisturbed in their snug little beds at night. In the morning, they move the clothes back to the freshly made beds. Of course, it takes twice as much time and energy to engage in this maddening campaign than it would to simply go ahead and put the clothes away properly. I can't explain why teenagers do things like this. It's like observing the mating habits of some strange species of frog in the rain forest. I fail to comprehend how I can be genetically related to human beings who behave so badly.

I guess the worth-it factor to my teenagers in this cost-benefit ratio is just how enraged their behavior makes me. My head has been known to spin around like a top. Fire shoots out of my eyes like I am a character in a comic book. My voice screeches through two octaves in outrage. I think my children enjoy the fireworks like a television reality show. It breaks up the day. Their behavior causes me to lose my already tenuous hold on hormonal surges of temper. I've seen my teens blow bubbles in my face with their gum and make sarcastic remarks to one another
while I am still ranting
. That's right. My kids make fun of me as I am standing there raising
Cain. It's all about what tickles the funny bone, I guess. I am here to tell you: Big Mama is not amused.

When my kids are caught in an early-morning time crunch, they solve the must-put-up-the-laundry-now-that-I-didn't-put-up-yesterday-before-the-old-bag-starts-yelling dilemma more creatively. Even for the ungrateful wretches (as I lovingly refer to the teenagers I gave birth to myself), this is lower than a snake's belly. The first time it happened (yes, they've done it more than once, the little monsters), I refused to believe the evidence before my own eyes.

The morning began like any other. I began emptying the laundry hampers (because—surprise, surprise—my middle child forgot to perform his little chore again) right after getting my kids off to school. Guess what I found? You are not going to believe it. I found a pile of
clean
clothes crammed willy-nilly into the
dirty
clothes hamper! No need to reread that sentence. You read it correctly the first time. Yes, ma'am, one of those children I carried around in my very own uterus really did that. To avoid the oh-so-terrible job of putting clean clothes away, my teen elected to skip the whole wearing-of-the-clothes stage and jump right back into the relentless, endlessly looping dirty laundry cycle.

You can probably guess what happened then. I completely lost it. For about a minute, I fantasized about showing up at the high school carrying the dirty clothes hamper from my boys' bathroom. In this fantasy, I planned to empty the hamper theatrically on one of my children's heads, preferably while he was surrounded by all his friends to heighten the public humiliation. I also contemplated the satisfaction I might receive from simply dumping all the clothes in my child's drawers out his bedroom window. Then I remembered how much those clothes cost me, and that fantasy ceased to appeal. I admit it: the discovery of clean clothes stuffed
into the dirty clothes hamper lit me up like a Roman candle. I don't think I would have been any angrier if I'd opened a door and found my husband in bed with another woman. Truly.

I vowed on the spot that this foul injustice would not go unanswered. Determined to identify the culprit, I set out on my search with the zeal of a Nazi hunter. A bloodhound couldn't have kept up with me. I was out for Shakespearean-style vengeance. When I finally identified the little criminal, I planned to assign enough yard work to last until the kid qualified for Social Security benefits.

Another thing my teenagers do with clean laundry that makes me want to whack them over the heads with a tennis racket is that when they finally deign to push, squeeze, and poke the clothes into already overflowing, messy drawers, they make no attempt to refold, stack, or tuck so as to utilize the limited storage space in any useful or meaningful way. My children have actually gouged the furniture, caught the clothing on the backs of drawers, and forced the drawers on antique chests to close or open with brute force—to the distinct detriment of the furniture that I saved long and hard to buy.

They will apparently do anything to avoid a minor frustration that could have been solved with five minutes of patience and attention to detail. I've lost count of the number of drawers my kids have trashed like Huns sacking their way to the coast. They don't know the meaning of gentle persuasion or patient tugging. They go at those drawers like miners hacking their way into a vein of gold.
Jerk. Pull. Stuff. Slam.
I once came upon my middle child stuffing his blue jeans into a drawer at great expense to the hand-carved woodwork along the bottom of the chest. “Son, that chest survived the French Revolution and then made it another 150 years until you came along. Show a little respect,” I told him.

Everything with teenagers is about instant gratification. When I finally throw a full-scale tantrum and forbid everyone from leaving their rooms until the drawers are reorganized, they do the most superficial job possible—the very least they can get away with upon inspection. Even if the clothes make it into a drawer, they are sure to be wadded up like newspapers used to ignite a fire. That's the way it is with teenagers. Every time I encounter another shocker and think to myself,
I don't actually have to say that, do I?
or
Anyone with good sense knows not to … ,
I find that I do, indeed, have to say it. Over and over again. It is never enough to simply explain in a reasonable and logical manner what must be done, to give a clear rationale, and to expect it to be handled. This is how the cliché “Do it because I said so” came to be. “There can be only one general in the house,” I tell them. “Think of me as a five-star.”

These are the same people who text me from their bedrooms to ask when dinner will be ready. I have to threaten them with the loss of electronic devices before I can ensure compliance with the simplest of things—like hanging up wet towels. Think about it. How much can you really explain about the necessity of hanging up wet towels? It's what humans do. It's the kind of behavior that separates us from animals. It's self-explanatory to anyone with an IQ above freezing.

So
, I ask myself,
how is it possible that I am involved in yet another conversation about wet towels and putting away the laundry?
The answer is clear. It's because teenagers don't care one bit about wet towels or clean laundry. They have different priorities. In order for laundry to move up in the pecking order of importance to teenagers, I've found that it is necessary to encourage them to embrace my priorities as their own. I find it's much easier to do that when I am holding their car keys, their cell phones, and their allowance
hostage. Frankly, you have to be willing to go there. I am willing. I have three words for teenagers: bring it on. This laundry fairy is worn slap out.