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Natural disasters of the bedroom kind

 

My daughter is smart, kind, attractive … Everything about this teenager makes me proud. Except her bedroom.

When I open the door to Katy's room, if I can get it open, I face a giant tossed salad. Books, clothes, food, CDs, all mixed up together. This week's wardrobe surrounds her bed in little piles, Monday's shirt, jeans, and shoes to the right, Tuesday's beside that, and so forth. Between these stacks are rumpled brown bags smelling faintly of ham and apple core. Open magazines lie on the bed, gum wrappers, and the telephone. Radio's blaring Ani DiFranco's latest hit. The bed table's sticky with pop spilled from a fallen can, and so on. No, this is not the well-ordered mix of a tossed salad. Katy's room is the scene of a natural disaster.

So, why don't Katy's parents make her clean up the mess? We do. We have. We will again. But why should we have to? Why doesn't Katy keep her living space inhabitable, without our commanding it?

Maybe it's a question of power. Katy knows trashing her room bothers Mom and Dad big time. She can actually push us over the edge, without lifting a finger. Now that's power. Sweet victory to best her own parents.

But that doesn't make sense, because Katy's the one who has to live in the rubble. Maybe she likes it that way. Can that be possible? She claims her own house will be featured in trendy magazines. And she'll keep it shiny clean.

Now, our home is no photo op for House and Garden. There is a lot of clutter. Books and papers pile up in the study, toy cities populate the family room, and the kitchen smells of melted cheese and chocolate chip cookies. But these rooms are picked up two or three times a day. The array of stuff is organized and relatively clean. Like freshly cut vegetables all washed and arranged, carrots in one pile, radishes in another. A buffet of salad ingredients, before someone comes along to toss it. Quite different from Katy's place.

Friends advise us to leave Katy to her own messes. They say she'll change, eventually. We've tried waiting. But when Katy can't find her hiking socks, and she's required to have some for the school camping trip, I have to find them or buy a new pair. So I venture in there, in search of socks. Now, if I had been persuaded that it was Katy's personal business how she keeps her room, I've just changed my mind. We've been negligent as parents to allow her to become so uncivilized. So I begin another campaign to teach Katy to care about her room.

It's a question of self-respect, I think. If she cares her appearance, and she does, how can she not care about the appearance of her room, and what her friends think when they see it? Maybe she gets peer status points for having the messiest room.

John and I realize that the motivation for being neat must come from within Katy. But since we can't find anything within Katy that will keep her room reasonable, we continue pressure from without, hoping some day she'll want it clean.

Sometimes there is hope. A while ago, John and I were away on our annual anniversary weekend, and Katy helped her grandmother take care of little Anna. Katy did a terrific job. That's no surprise, she's an unusually kind and considerate person. The big surprise was that Katy spent the last two hours cleaning house. Our kitchen was crumbless, the family room vacuumed, and even the clean clutter was out of sight. We were in heavenly shock. A million hugs assured Katy we were delighted to discover she has so much talent for cleaning.

Later that day, I descended into the reality of her room, quickly closed my eyes and retreated. One day of peace, thank you. At that moment, I thought, we're crazy to worry too much about Katy's room.

 

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