As I was peeling the very sticky wrapping off one of the cupcakes my 13-year old daughter made, I noticed it wasn’t just the cupcake wrapper that was sticky, it was the counter. A friend of mine told me that when her teenage daughter decides to bake, she thinks of a long lost article I wrote when our children were little. It started with “I was a good mom today, I let my kids paint.”
The article talked about how when little kids paint, it’s an aerobic event for the parent. Little kids paint feverishly and don’t stop until they have completed a tablet’s worth of pictures. Jockeying wet paintings around, while trying to find places for them, while running intercept between a child with a paint brush and your household furnishings is a lot of work. So when a parent of a small child allows the child to paint, they are, by default, a good parent for willingly allowing the onslaught of art that will keep them running for the next couple hours.
We of course are very happy our teenage children can bake without assistance, but we know what the kitchen will look like when they are done. No matter how much we plead with them to clean up after themselves, the command “make sure you clean up after yourself” morphs in their adolescent minds: It could mean, “The kitchen was a mess before I came in, so I’ll only clean the part that applies to me.” It could mean “You don’t really mean me, do you?”
It could mean, “I should eat all the cupcakes so they aren’t cluttering the counter.”
It could mean, “You don’t mean all of it, do you?” It could mean, “If I don’t clean it up now, everyone will forget I’m supposed to clean it up after I’ve addled their brains with cupcakes.”
So it goes without saying, when a parent of a teen, allows them to bake they are also, by default, a good parent. When I stop to ponder why my teens don’t clean up after themselves, I have to wonder if it’s just the nature of a teen or if it’s something I did or rather didn’t do when they were little.
I have to admit, there are things I did not know about the abilities of small children; the biggest being that they possess the ability to pick up after themselves. So in my ignorance, I never made them pick up when they were small. And since I really hated picking up by myself, their toy messes were only picked up when company was coming.
When my older daughter was three, it began to dawn on me she could probably help me pick up the messes she made. Her sister would have been six months old by then and my daughter and I both knew who made the mess. One day as I tried to cajole her into helping me with the “Tom Sawyer painting a picket fence method,” she sat back and gave me an exasperated sigh. She exclaimed, “Why do we have to pick up? We can just step over it!” I ended up cleaning the room myself in my embarrassment over the reality of my not-so-great parenting.
But I have been making them pick up after themselves for many years now; a decade or more at least. But they still don’t do it automatically; I have to tell them to do it. I really want to blame it on their adolescent brains, but my husband often doesn’t pick up unless I tell him to. So what I really think is going on is they have a mental disorder called “Momitis.”
“Itis” is a suffix used in pathological terms that denote inflammation of an organ; or in this case, acute inflammation in the part of their brains expecting mom to do everything for them. It cannot be cured by mom taking a day off. The symptoms are only masked when mom is not around; upon mom’s return, they come back.
The only cure is for them to grow up and have children of their own. My husband has wifeitis; but that is another topic.
Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom and writer committed to writing about the humor amidst the chaos of a family. You can read her daily blog or reach her at her website: livingwithgleigh.com.
Gretchen is a stay-at-home mom committed to writing about the humor amidst the chaos of a family. You can read her daily blog and reach her at her website.
