They've Grown Up Just Like Me

My Girls Are Just Like Me.

Like so many times before, when I visited a friend's home the other night there wasn't a piece of paper on any of the kitchen counters, nothing on the kitchen island, and nothing on the dining room table. I asked," Do your children live here?"

Moments before I had left my middle one home doing a school project which had exploded all over the dining room and kitchen tables, as well as the living room floor.

My friend just smiled. He had seen my house, once -- in all it's lived in glory. So as we stood there, me lost in the neatness and him asking if I wanted a beverage, (No thanks, I'm driving.), I wondered just how do you get a house picked up?

I am constantly shoveling clutter against the tide. Shoes in the front hall, jackets dropped where they are shed, lunch boxes, book bags, laundry. I used to pick up after them, now I remind. Your jacket gets hung up. Get your shoes out of the middle of the room. Put your book bag in the mud room. Your jacket gets hung up. Put your dishes in the dishwasher. I really don't need to touch every dirty dish in this house. Clean laundry goes in the drawers, not on the floor. Your jacket gets hung up.

Yesterday was the saga of the missing homework. We excavated high and low -- no homework. It would be a do over with the reminder, "If you put it in your folder, you would have it now..."

But I really can't fault them too much, as they are proving to me that the apple truly does not fall far from the tree. During yesterday's homework hunt, we searched around and through my sewing machine and generous pile up of curtain material left on the dining room table, to my banjo and music stand in the living room (along with laundry folded on the couch), to the book bag project left hanging over my sacred kitchen chair, to my desk littered with information for my most recent magazine article and book rewrite, and finally to the mountain of paperwork for Girl Scouts and school stacked in the kitchen.

My mother used to say to me, "I know where you've been?" I used to wonder how. For a while now, I've uttered the same phrase to my own. Yesterday, I knew it was all my fault. I had to put something away. I had to clean up part of my own explosion.

Digging in my heels and unearthing the machine, I set my goals on finishing the curtains, and then clearing up its associated mess. Hours later; curtains pressed and hung, the ironing board is away and sewing machine and bag of extra material back to the attic. I think there might be an enough floor space where I could vacuum today. Better yet, I'll finish the book bag project and get it off my chair.