Kids are messy. Mine are no different than most. Tidiness just doesn’t seem to be high on their priority list. Mess drives me insane however. If they are like pigs, then I am the mad cow in the house. I can’t even think if my visual landscape is out of order. I’m sure I have a touch of OCD, inherited directly from my father. When we all went to college and moved out of the house, my mother used to scatter magazines and newspapers around to give him something to straighten because with our absence went all the coats and gear by the back stairs that used to give him such a weird satisfaction to organize. I can’t believe I’ll miss my kids’ things spreading everywhere like a virus, but maybe the lack of those things is a reminder that the house is empty of busy children. My mother was smart enough to mess up the family room after we left so my father would stay away from her desk, which was usually piled high with bills and paperwork in a haphazard-looking fashion so incredibly tempting to him. Except she knew where every paper was and after he had straightened her desk she couldn’t find anything for weeks.
The current conflict in my house is over bathroom real estate. All three share the same bathroom, which I realize was overly optimistic once they hit puberty, but I designed the space to avoid problems when we remodeled. There is a pocket door dividing the two sinks and bathtub from the toilet and shower. Only the oldest (boy) uses the pocket door, or even the bathroom door at all. The girls leave both doors wide open regardless of what they are doing in the bathroom, whether from immodesty or carelessness one never knows. But even with the door shut the oldest still can’t really shower or poop in private because one of the girls is always at the sink or in the tub or banging on the door for shampoo that she accidentally left in the shower and doesn’t want any of the others to use. And yet the layout has worked fairly well until recently. Now the girls are 13 and 15, with all the accoutrements that come with that age and our modern culture. Curling irons, straighteners, makeup, hair bands, face washes and creams, lotions and potions times two. There are several toothpaste tubes because they don’t like to share. The youngest leaves the top off and it dries out, the oldest squeezes from the top and leaves it in a distorted shape. The middle takes hers into her bedroom every night. There are small drawers underneath the sinks, but most of their stuff is out, covering every square inch of counter space. There have been fights about dried toothpaste spit left in the sink, the turtle being left in the sink for his bath, dirty clothes on the floor, pee on the toilet seat, tampon boxes just plain existing, clogged toilet, no hot water because one took too long a shower, no shampoo because the girls hide theirs in their rooms. For awhile the middle one moved all her stuff to the bathroom above the garage and avoided the whole issue, but the inconvenience of walking outside and up a flight of stairs in her towel during the winter has brought her back to the communal space, and with her more arguments.
Last night the oldest and the youngest were in the bathroom at the same time, getting ready to go to my parents for Sunday dinner. He (oldest) tried to tell her that she and her sister had to share the left sink and he would take the right sink. The youngest took about a nanosecond to process that and said, “You don’t get a whole sink to yourself. There are three of us and we’re sharing two sinks.” He was trying to divide based on their gender, but she wasn’t falling for it. He started shouting that they had ten times more stuff then he did and began piling it all in the sink she was using. “That’s not my stuff anyway, it’s (middle daughter’s),” she said calmly. I imagine she was brushing her hair. I couldn’t see them, but I overheard the whole exchange. “You’re not taking the whole sink,” she added for good measure, “get used to it.” I greatly admired her aplomb. I wish I had that kind of control. Her brother then tried to convince me of the logic behind his argument, but we were late and I put him off.
When we got to my parents their Corgi came to the door barking hysterically, wearing a cone around his head. He had been licking a hot spot on his paw for months and had contracted a staph infection, the diagnosis panicking my mother. She dotes on the dog to such an extent that my son and I started calling him Trickie Woo, a spoiled character from James Herriot’s book All Creatures Great and Small. My parents’ dog is allergic to everything (perhaps from the stress of so much attention) so they had driven to the only pet allergist in the area, a two hour drive from their house. This vet gave them medicine that my Dad has to inject in the dog every other day. They also get serum mailed to them on dry ice that they have to put on his gums. When my Dad complained to the vet that they spent a thousand dollars on this issue last year, the vet said, “And it’s going to cost you a thousand dollars today.” My father’s expression as he told me this story was pained. This has nothing to do with my children’s arguments in the bathroom, but relates to the spirit of my family and the role animals play in it. I teased my mother that night, but she said defensively, “you spent that much on your dying ferret!” Touche.
Back to the bathroom problem. The argument has continued. The middle one washed her riding boots in the right hand sink the other day, the one claimed by the oldest, who could barely contain his rage when he witnessed it. We do have a big sink in the laundry room for that kind of thing. When he yelled at her asking why she didn’t use the other sink she said it didn’t occur to her, having never really acknowledged his ownership of the right hand sink. “I’m not washing my boots anyway, just the soles. Geez,” she said, as if he were completely overreacting. “Mom!” he shouted for me. I didn’t want to get involved, but the volume was increasing. My daughter began her usual strong offense as the best defense, pointing out how her brother leaves his clothes on the floor and doesn’t flush the toilet etc. I wanted to call a Time Out, wishing for the days when I had that kind of authority. I did the next best thing and separated them before blood was spilled.
Now it’s a day by day issue. Their schedules are such that they don’t overlap very often in the bathroom so I’m just trying to keep my head down and weather the storms when they come because it makes no sense to reorganize living quarters for the next six months, at which point my son will graduate from high school and leave the house. I console myself with the thought that they are all getting early training to share bathrooms as adults. After all, I get annoyed when my husband uses my little scissors to clip his nose hair in my sink (we have two) and then doesn’t rinse it out. I guess he’s saving water. We DO share toothpaste however, something the kids are still arguing about today. I guess it’s the little things…
댓글