Making my Daughter's Bed

In the Billy Joel song Captain Jack there is a line that reads: Well you are 21 and still your mother makes your bed, and that’s too long. Uhh….Wrong. The reason Billy Joel even thought to write that line is because he is a man. No woman would write that—especially when they have to walk past their 21+ year old child’s room everyday to see what a crap box mess it is. I make my 22 year old child’s bed in order to maintain my own tenuous state of sanity. I do it for me, not her. Sorry Billy to contradict you.

My mother (who supports as often as takes issue with my views on parenting) very recently accused me of encouraging my 22 year old daughter to move out because I had become OCD like my Aunt Sally and just wanted a neat house. What she implied in her statement, but was too passive-aggressive to say out loud was, that it was proper and desirable for girls to live at home with their mother until they marry and their husband supports them; AND, that by encouraging my daughter to be on her own, I was corrupting her moral character and not fulfilling my motherly role.

Okay first of all, she already has grandchildren with their own apartments so this shouldn’t have been a shock. And secondly, and more importantly, children are only leased to their parents. We do not own them. And good parents understand that their job is to nurture and support independent, well-adjusted children who reach adulthood financially and emotionally self-supporting. The fact that they go off the family payroll and ones’ house remains neat and clean as a result, is just a really big perk.

And quite honestly when I was 22 years old I was perfectly content living in a crapbox mess too. My mother forgets. I “made” my bed by pulling the comforter over my rumpled sheets. And as far as the messy room went: I just either hid my clothes on my closet floor, put them under my bed, or put the clean and/or dirty clothes down the laundry chute. The payback for my mother nagging me about my messy room and having me be in charge of straightening it out was that my mother had much more laundry and ironing to do AND she still had to remake my bed.

And when my mother had me vacuum my room I certainly never moved the furniture. Although I lied and told her I did. I remember one year on Thanksgiving my little cousins had played in my room, eaten olives and thrown the pits behind my dresser. The pits and the voluminous dust bunnies behind the dresser formed such a symbiosis that at Easter that same year there were olive trees growing in my room. It was like living in Greece.

Which is why I limit my nagging to more important issues like Did you follow-up on that job opportunity? or Did you let Jasper and Cosmo out after they were fed? I have chosen to concede the battle of her tornado-like living quarters . My 22 year old’s unmade bed and crapbox room is only temporary—a current chore with a finite end.  The contract on my parental lease is drawing to a close and there is no option to own. It’s just the way of it. All birds must fly. And once she makes her own nest, she can keep it as clean or messy as she likes. As long as she tidies up before her grandmother visits.