A few months ago, I went on strike. Not at work, but at home. I told my husband and two kids I wouldn’t be cooking, cleaning, or lifting a finger for the next 24 hours. I left the house with pots and pans in the sink, clothes on the floor, wet towels piling up, and a vapor of resentment steaming in my wake.
When I came back an hour later, nothing had changed. I practically had to handcuff myself to my Subaru to stop from crossing my own picket line.
Long a bargaining battleground, my son’s teenage hideaway zaps my energy the most. It’s as if a magnetic force has drawn half the items in our house — LEGO constructions, plants, an assortment of teas, my hair products, my husband’s vintage bottle of Hai Karate aftershave, a checkered game table we’d been looking for and couldn’t find for months — into Marlow’s room.
It takes all my willpower to walk by his door and not nudge it open when I can visualize the scene inside: damp, dirty socks and half his wardrobe heaped in a corner; candy wrappers shoved into the bookcase; various colognes teetering in various places. I worry about spills and spores, but I also know if I always clean up his room, he won’t learn to do it himself.
Since my “strike,” we’ve agreed on terms. He won’t bring in any food that stains (I’m looking at you, Trader Joe’s takis) or that requires cooking — say, steak and eggs — and I won’t go in there without permission.
I asked around to get tips for what works. My neighbors are now grandparents but reminisced about the deal they struck with their older daughter when she was a teenager: “Once a week, find the floor.”
“The rule was pick up all the clothes to see the floor of your room by Sunday at 8 p.m., or you can’t have any friends over the following week,” they elaborated, adding that their daughter would “wait until just before the deadline and scoop up the piles of clothes into the laundry chute.”
One of my friends, a high school teacher, takes a different approach: She has a chore binder with plastic-sleeved pages enumerating tasks her kids can choose from to earn fast cash, everything from “vacuum stairs and wipe (each step + trim),” worth $1 for 10 minutes, to “pull weeds from front + side garden,” $3 for 30 minutes.
Even more brilliant? She doesn’t refer to these tasks as “chores” but as “opportunities” (which are different from “expectations,” such as showering or emptying the dishwasher). It’s a win-win all around because the kids get paid to do work my friend would otherwise do herself, and, as she confessed, “I am not good at cleaning.”
That’s when it struck me: I am good at cleaning, a skill I inherited from my mother, who perpetually leaves a pair of rubber kitchen gloves under our sink even though she lives in Florida.
My husband helps clean, too, but he isn’t as bothered by messes. He and my son also occasionally suffer from Man Eyes, “the incurable disease where men can’t find items that are in plain sight,” according to one TikTok user’s diagnosis.
Meanwhile, I scan a room and instantly see everything that’s out of place like I have Terminator vision. It’s a gift and a burden.
The parent vs. teen tug-of-war over bedrooms is par for the course, says Oberlin College psychology professor and developmental psychologist Nancy Darling. While kids generally accept a parent’s right to set the rules about health and safety issues, they view their personal domain as off-limits, even from a young age.
“And what happens when they hit adolescence is, what’s personal expands,” she says.
Nagging isn’t sustainable, she adds, but a little nudging to take three minutes and clear the floor might help, before “bringing their attention to how they feel” when it’s done. Then be cool and don’t overdo it with praise.
“Next time you walk in, say, ‘Wow, this looks terrific,’” Darling suggests. “‘Doesn’t this feel good?’”
Without my interference, Marlow decorated his room with Japanese touches and douses it in red, blue, or green light depending on his mood and the button on his light-bulb remote control. He makes his bed every morning and straightens up every night. A makeshift couch blocks his closet door, so he folds and stores his clothes under his bed.
When Marlow is home from school, I sometimes pop my head into his room to see — and smell — various jarred concoctions he’s made. On Veterans Day, he cooked up the idea to invent beverages that taste like famous colognes, using different spices. For days, a Ball jar labeled “Tastes Like How Dior Sauvage Smells” infused his room with notes of clove and cinnamon.
He makes body wash by boiling Dove bar soap in a pot and turning it into foam. A mysterious paste in the bathroom has turmeric in it. “Tell him not to use turmeric — it stains!” my mother says when I tell her about it. But I’m choosing my battles, and despite some yellow fingerprints on the walls, there are great rewards, especially in the kitchen.
As a little kid, Marlow was a classic picky eater. Now he cooks for himself: pasta with vodka sauce sans vodka, pizza from homemade dough, steak, and soooo much ground beef.
It’s not a perfect system: There’s often something sticky or squishy underfoot. But he’s much more independent than I was at his age. A big part of that is because I’ve forced myself to let go, to let him make his own messes — and clean them up.
Occasionally I watch Marlow at the stove, scrambling an egg, and remember the little boy who once used up all our dental floss to string the house with “webs” and put glue on his hands and feet so he could climb the living room walls like Spider-Man.
I already know that, soon enough, I’ll miss the mess.
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