| Neatness
Counts! Or does it? An exasperated dad holds a family forum with his three adolescent daughters. By David Laskin (10/4/00) The vocabulary of outraged domesticity is surely the most hackneyed in the language. Direct it at kids and it becomes even staler because we hear our own parents' voices bubbling up from deep inside, like last night's hastily gobbled dinner. How many times do I have to tell you - pick up after yourself. Clean your room. Make your bed. Hang your towel. Don't throw those candy wrappers on the floor. We're not proud of braying out commands like an inflamed drill sergeant, at least I'm not. My model for running a family is more Mr. Rogers than boot camp, believe me. And believe me again: my wife and I have tried everything to get our three adolescent daughters to pitch in and pick up after themselves - bribery, grounding, a hyperkinetic "clean-up hour" with Little Richard turned up all the way to get us moving, family group therapy sessions (Is it because you're punishing me? Are those soggy towels draped on the banister a symbol of your disappointment with this family?), sarcasm (Just go ahead and trash the house! the maid will take care of it!), verbal abuse (Get those dishes in the sink NOW, you little turkey). But none of it works worth a damn - with the exception of the towering inferno of rage (I confess to ripping a towel rack off the wall and hurling volleys of rubber duckies at my kids in the bathtub after stumbling one time too many on their dirty underwear), and that only works for as long as the blood pressure is boiling. So now I'm going to try something new: the electronic family essay. Since we recently networked our home computers, I can make this diatribe pop up on every screen in the house, which is obviously the only way to get my daughters to pay attention. I'm going to cajole - okay, goad - each of them into composing her own response, which will then materialize on my computer screen. Once we've all had our say, harmony and cleanliness will dawn over our domicile like a dewy May sunrise. At least that's the idea. Okay, kids, now it's your turn to mouth off, answer back, explain, apologize, rationalize, analyze, whatever. So what gives? Why are you such slobs? Alice, let's start with you. I've been picking your soggy towels up from the floor for almost 13 years now. What's up with that, as you would say? Why do you breed mess and chaos like some malarial swamp? Alice answers: First of all, I do care about my room and how clean it is, but the rest of the house-ehh, who cares? By now, I've figured out my parents do care, and ignoring them is not a good idea. Back to my room. I like it clean because it's my sanctuary. Luckily for me, the door has a lock; I can blast the music I like as loud as I want -- almost. I can read quietly and pretend I'm asleep if I don't want to talk to anyone. It's the only place I can sing without being yelled at. What am I writing about again? Oh yeah! Another reason I'm a "slob" is that I forget. "Alice, put away all the stuff after you're done." "Ok, ok, ok! I will!" But time goes by and suddenly I'm doing something else of interest and by the time I remember to clean up-"ALICE! You never cleaned up your crap. Do it now!" Oops! I didn't mean to leave it all there... I do care about the rest of the house, actually. Really, I do! If you count my bathroom and the family room (which has the TV and computer in it) as the rest of the house. I care about my bathroom because-oooh! My nail polish lives there (all 36 bottles of it), along with all the rest of my "necessities." So, I guess what it all comes down to is that I care about the parts of the house that I use - and sort of just forget about the rest of it. Dad here again: Hmm. Maybe if we expanded your nail polish collection so that it engulfed every room in the house you'd expand your tidiness accordingly. Infinite distractibility - somehow I assumed that kind of petered out with the toddler years but evidently not. So, maybe the solution is to install a little beeper or mild electronic shocker to bring you guys back down to reality and return your wandering attention to the task at hand. Sarah, you're not as evil as your twin Alice in the soggy towel department, but like a slug with its slime you always leave a trail of discarded clothes behind you, and whenever you make your favorite macaroni and cheese, you leave the stove smeared with this horrible yellow glop - again slug slime comes to mind. So what's your explanation/excuse? Sarah speaks: I have to admit that even I, Queen Slob, would go a little crazy if I stepped on an article of clothing or a board game wherever I put my foot down. Which is why I do pick my stuff up eventually - though maybe not the minute I'm done with it. You get mad at me for leaving dried macaroni and cheese on the stove top and want me to wipe it up and sometimes I do. But sometimes I just think a little hard scrubbing never hurt anyone - anyone your age, I mean. I have better things to do, right? But anyway, why am I such a slob? Maybe it has to do with the fact that I'm somewhat lazy and that I'd even rather be doing math homework than clean my room. I mean, who wants to pick up dirty clothes and make your bed and do the laundry? Well, it's definitely not me. Dad is back: Emily, since you're fifteen and a half, I'm counting on you to inject a note of sanity and deeper meaning into this debate. You know the beef without me going into it. So what's your take? Maybe you guys like hearing us nag because the repetitions are hypnotic, kind of like the numbing chorus to some endless rock song? Sarah and Alice admit to being lazy and distracted - but there's got to be more going on here than that, since you all manage to summon the energy and attention to get homework done (most of the time), download songs, dress yourselves, eat, breathe, etc. Why does the simple task of picking up after yourself baffle you every time? Emily's spin: Baffle us? On the contrary, I, for one, have the messy room situation totally figured out. Walking over piles of paper, clothes, CDs, guitars, etc. does not bother me. Left to my own devices I would probably clean my room before it began to stink really badly. Dirty clothing smells are gross; dirty clothes on the floor are not. As it is I clean my room when the nagging becomes unbearable, or when I feel really guilty. This is not laziness, it's indifference. Why don't you rush out to buy the new CD from a band I like? Not because you're lazy but because you don't care. That's how I feel about household mess. On the topic of nagging, you may ask, "When does nagging become unbearable? Why doesn't it work the first time I nag?" Well, father, it's because nagging, in and of itself, is very easy to ignore. There are many approaches to blocking out the sounds of nagging parents. You may want to ask Sarah and Alice about some if you're curious. I personally prefer the turning up the "numbing chorus to the endless rock song" method. It works especially well if said "endless rock song" happens to be Pearl Jam or Red Hot Chili Peppers, played on a radio with bad reception so that you have to listen really really hard to understand the deeper messages (or riffs) of the songs. You use similar tactics in the car if we're whining. But I digress. To answer the other question, nagging becomes unbearable in one of two ways. 1) Parents begins to scream and cannot be quieted until room is spotless. No one likes this at all. 2) Parent questions child about room every time they see each other. Parent speaks of nothing else. The adult may get a kick out of it, but I can assure you the kid doesn't appreciate it. So to inject a note of sanity and deeper meaning into this contentious discourse, I have a final suggestion for you. Why don't you tell us why you care so much about our rooms being clean? We do plenty of other things we don't like (homework) because we know, or imagine, that there is a reason or it will do us some good. Why would we clean our rooms when that would be doing something unpleasant and pointless? Dad wraps up: Deeper meaning indeed! Clearly I have a budding Heidegger coming of age under my very own roof (I bet old Martin never picked up a pair of dirty undies in his life). But seriously, why DO I care? What IS the point here? I guess it comes down to that dynamic duo: time and money. Money squandered on objects that get lost, broken, stepped on, accidentally thrown out in the chaos. Time wasted searching, sorting, sifting, not to mention redoing laundry when the clean pile bleeds into the dirty clothes and the whole thing gets hurled (by me) into the washing machine. There's also the matter of offended aesthetic sensibility, something that evidently doesn't kick in until middle age. Mess is gross and ugly, especially someone else's mess. And then, a level down, there's the moral/political dimension. Frankly, it doesn't seem fair that some people get to trash the house while other people clean it. I like to think that our family abides by a kind of Rousseauist social contract: we escape the nastiness of the "state of nature" (i.e., soggy towels and candy wrappers) by exchanging some freedoms for shared responsibilities. But maybe this is just a liberal-yuppie dream. Maybe what's really going on in our serene split level is a miniature totalitarian state: power resides in a dictator (me) who controls the masses (you kids) for your own good through terror, repression, propaganda and a highly organized, omniscient and brutally efficient secret police force (mom). Though despite ferocious state crackdowns, there are uprisings, civil disobedience, and a flourishing underground protest literature scrawled on prison walls in chocolate syrup and mac-and-cheese slime. Kidding aside, the simple, or not so simple, truth is that family life, at least as I've experienced it, defies politics or esthetics. Reading between the lines of my kids' flip responses to my snide put-downs, I see the same maddening web of ambivalence that entangles me. They know they should help but they're selfish and lazy. They want control of their lives as long as someone else does the heavy-lifting (not to mention tedious advance planning). When there's a free ride available, they'll happily take it as long as it lasts, even it if does get bumpy and noisy at times. All of which sounds pretty reasonable if you're not the one left holding the bag. Sure, I can relate to blowing off unpleasant chores. Right behind the domestic tyrant there's a petulant kid inside of me who wants to hurl the dishes out the window, torch the bills, and kill my vacuum cleaner - just as I suppose there's a kernel of adult responsibility inside my daughters that motivates them at intervals to clean up their crap. I guess the best I can do at this point is keep a sense of humor - and sense of perspective. Someday they're each going to assume control of their own domestic principality. And I will be the gracious, mellow ambassador from the sunny republic that ratified a relaxed new constitution upon their departure. David Laskin is the author, most recently, of Partisans, Marriage and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals. He lives in Seattle with his family.
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