Making a clean sweep of mother-son relations
Posted
January 27, 2009 at
2:06 pm by
Kymberly
Can this relationship be saved?
No, not my husband and I. We’re cool. What I’m talking about is myself and my son. When it comes to cleaning, my eleven year old son thinks a horizontal surface is a space onto which he can drop trading cards, old homework, various action figures, and tiny plastic parts barely visible to the naked eye belonging to erector sets he does not even remember owning.
He calls these spaces “my room just how I like it.”
I call these spaces dumpsters.
No Change. Ladies, if you are reading this, let me set you straight: not only is it quite nearly impossible to ever “change” a man, you barely have a fighting chance even when you’ve had him in your clutches since birth.
Talk about a “self made man.” I made this (future) man and I have had no more luck in “teaching” him to be naturally neat than I would have had in teaching my dog to tap dance.
My son is a good boy. He’s a lovely person if I do say so myself and we get many compliments on him. Overall, we think he’s a keeper. Then I walk into his room and I just about want to cry. Or light a match.
Mounds. There are simply mounds everywhere. Mounds of clothing (some clean, some dirty, the problem is in knowing which is which?) Mounds of bedding. Mounds of colorful plastic that must be part of something terrifically creative – or terribly deranged. This boy has never seen a horizontal surface he didn’t think would be perfect to pile something – anything – upon. It’s as if the very sight of a clean, uncluttered flat surface leaves him somehow incomplete.
I have entered the room, looked around, and unable to discern signs of life been forced to call out (slightly panicked) for him. He will pop up from under some pile or other and say “I’m right here mom!” as if the small bulge in the teetering mound of wadded up laundry, bedding, a drum set, desk chair, and a couple hundred pounds of Pokemon cards should CLEARLY have indicated his presence all along.
I understand that some mothers just throw in the towel (and pillowcase, dirty laundry, and crusty bowls stashed under the bed). I, however, am no pushover. I’ve tried playing the heavy, but my son’s room is enough to make “don’t make me come in there!” less a strong, disciplinary missive and more a pathetic plea for mercy.
Mold. Hope springs eternal and I really thought I could mold a man (and what, after all, is a nine year old boy but simply a mini-man sans car keys and a career by which to bankroll his own cleaning staff?) From the time he was very small I would cheerfully demonstrate how much “fun” it could be to clean up after ourselves.
I was the Improv mommy! I pantomimed that lying Barney the Dinosaur in sing-song “clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere, clean up, clean up everybody do their share!” The awesome power of a purple dinosaur combined with my can’t-carry-a-tune-in-a-bucket singing notwithstanding, I was shocked to discover as young as age three that my son absorbed the spirit, if not the letter of the thing. Grabbing one of the toy baskets I would say brightly “let’s clean up just like Barney says!” and my son, light of my life, would respond happily and with unbridled enthusiasm “okay!”
Within minutes he would be plopped down with a book, toy truck, or errant dust mote he spied floating by and cleaning nothing much at all.
Forever committed to a lost cause, I once attempted to use logic (never a good idea on a man of any age): “Honey, doesn’t Barney say “everybody do their share?” Who do you think everybody is sweetie?”
To which my son replied cheerily and with utter sincerity: “you?”
He was three. I let him live.
I love my son and he has many strengths. He is thoughtful, punctual, and kind. I fear nonetheless that I have given birth to the messier half of the Odd Couple. My son is Oscar to my Felix.
Worse, his trash is becoming my bag. Or baggage.
I can only apologize to any future daughter-in-law I may be blessed with and hope that she’ll love me anyway when I say I tried dear. I tried.
Until then, when it comes to my son and I and our wildly different definitions of “clean” I can only wonder “can this relationship be saved?”
More importantly, can old homework, torn trading cards, and Legos be saved too?
Tags: child, cleaning, dumpster, legos, mess, relationship, standards |
7 Responses to “Making a clean sweep of mother-son relations”
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1. Stacey S_MOD
January 27, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Oh I feel your pain!
I would just give up after scolding, yelling, threatening, & pleading, & I would simply go in there & clean it myself (Only once it got to the point of being a fire hazard mind you).
I even stopped putting his laundry away just so I didn’t have to walk in there anymore. I would drop off the basket of clean folded clothes & knock on his door like I was dropping off Chinese take out.
Every Sunday I would tell him to strip his bed & drop it all in the laundry room & I would leave the fresh linen on his mattress trying not to look while I was in there….to this day he doesn’t use a top sheet because “it’s too much work to put it on”.
Around the age of 12 I gave him the ultimatum….”I want your room cleaned by the end of the weekend, if it is not cleaned, I will go in there and clean it myself and I will throw away whatever I see fit”. Inevitably I was cleaning his room while he was at school on Monday. The only thing that caught his attention was the 5 count them FIVE garbage bags I hauled out of his room & placed in the garage. When he asked what was in them…I told him whatever I thought belonged in the trash, when he pleaded to go through them (he could see the Pokemon cards, toys, action figures etc… through the plastic)I told him “NO”, you snooze you loose. After the crying, begging, & pleading subsided he finally realized I wasn’t kidding around anymore!
This lasted appox. 1 year! After that he just didn’t care anymore. It’s a losing battle my friend. Shut the door & put up some hazmat tape because your sons room will look like that until the day he moves out!
Trust me…you won’t win! Walk away and keep your sanity cuz it just ain’t worth it!
2. mully
January 27, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
But..I am here to tell you that if you have taught them how to do it…cleaning, laundry, cooking, even OMG! bathrooms! Sons DO come around and eventually make you proud.
They appear to not be listening, especially in the teenage years because it simply isnt important to them, but I swear to you, they absorb it all.
Both of my sons are exemplary when it comes to cleaning house, taking care of babies and doing laundry. They both love to cook too.
My daughter in law often comments to me that Scott (my oldest son) is better at all those things than she is.
If it makes you feel any better, my daughter was a bigger slob than her brothers by a looooong shot. I took a picture of her room, once when she was in high school after she had left for the day. I titled it “Katie’s Khaos” It was absolutely horrendous. You couldnt see carpet for all the clothing.
At some point you just learn to close the door and walk away, but I honestly believe, if theyve been taught properly, it kicks in later on.
3. GrandmafrKs.
January 27, 2009 @ 10:17 pm
“Amen Mully, ITA, It does pay off, they pay more attention than not and they remember how “Mom done it”
4. Lauren
January 28, 2009 @ 2:07 pm
I agree with Mully. It’s just a phase. My sons are 23 and 19 and they were MIA on Saturday mornings when they heard the vacuum coming down the hall towards their rooms. My daughter? OMG, she was worse and still is! The only thing she keeps neat is her bathroom. She likes the “spa” feel, she says. But her room is usually a disaster. Not dirty, but cluttered. The boys’ are out of the house now, for the most part, but they seem to have acquired some organizational skills. Either that, or they don’t have mom to help them find their “baseball socks,” so they put things away correctly.
You just teach them, and one day you hope all that teaching “took.”
5. Rita
January 28, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
Your 9 year-old son sounds like my 10-year-old (as of yesterday) daughter. Seriously. My 14 y.o. son is much, much neater than my daughter. She is exactly how you described your son. So, I venture to argue that it may not be a gender thing, but a personality thing.
I make her clean though. I let it go, and I let it go, and I let it go with just her “spit and a promise” efforts to get through until it cannot be ignored any further. Then she cleans. I set aside a day for her and she does it thoroughly. I go in and point out individual problems and she works on them. I go back in and point out how it’s still not done yet and she works some more. I go back and show her again how it’s not right and she’ll work on it for longer. Until the whole room is clean.
She won’t keep it consistently clean and I don’t have the time or energy to put into making it happen all the time, so it builds up again and we do it all over once more, a few months later.
6. Kymberly
January 28, 2009 @ 6:57 pm
Thanks for the commiseration.
I have a dream that the children will grow to naturally know how to clean and maintain tidy surroundings. That it will become second nature that they know how to KEEP things clean rather than dig out from under a mess every six months - or when the Health Department drops by - whichever comes first.
I have a dream that pigs can fly, apparently.
I’m not asking for white glove clean here. This is a 100+ year old house. If I got lightheaded over every cobweb or errant dust mote I’d be permanently prone on the floor.
I would just ask that heavy equipment and excavating not be required.
The thing is WHEN we buckle down and clean it, much like Rita described, in a day-long partnered “blitz” - both my children LOVE their rooms.
Apparently I’m on to something. It’s just going to take a few years to fruition?
7. mully
January 28, 2009 @ 8:30 pm
LOL….you hit the nail on the head…a few years…BUT, those years really do fly by and one day, youll walk into that empty bedroom and youll find yourself with that requisite lump in your throat wishing you were still looking at once was the mess of the century.