Back when the kids were little, one of my survival tactics was to write about all of the ridiculous, chaotic things they did so that other people could laugh about it and I wouldn’t feel so bad. As the girls got older, they realized that my blog posts made them look bad and they sent Natalee as a representative of the American Federation of Liv’s Kids and made demands that I quit writing bad things about them and only write glowing praises of their many positive attributes. I stopped blogging altogether for awhile. This hiatus in words fell between the oh-no-my-mom-is-reading self-censorship and the if-you-can’t-say-something-nice mute spell in my years of blogging.

Fast forward a decade or so and I have learned to largely leave my kids out of my writing other than an occasional union-sanctioned tribute. Until today.

Picture, if you will, a world where I have raised four daughters to near or semi-adulthood. I have bought a small house, adequate for myself and the One Remaining Offspring still living at home. Now imagine that summer, fire season and a pandemic all come along simultaneously and all three of the already-flown-the-coup chicklets, for various and assorted reasons, have found their way back to my Very Small House to use as a secondary launching pad. I don’t mind. I’d like to be able to provide them with the space and resources they need to get ahead and not fall behind in perpetual debt as I have for the last 20 years. So it’s fine. It’s great if I can save them some rent. It’s great if they want to come do their laundry and squish somewhere inside the 800 square feet of my house. Temporarily. I even bought a little camp trailer for overflow kids. I don’t mind. Until I come home from a fire assignment and it looks like a pack of trolls just moved out.

Listen, I get it. We all, all five of us, have jobs. Two of my offspring were off on fire assignments the same time that I was and so I can’t technically hold them responsible. The other two work as well. All of us work. All the time. But it turns out, that I am the only one who works AND is responsible for washing all of the dishes, cleaning up behind whichever spawn defiled the bathroom most recently, and apparently I am the only one who know how to wash and/or reuse bath towels. I came home to counters overflowing with moldy dishes and every. towel. dirty. Every towel. Dish towels, bath towels. Beach towels. Lying on various and assorted floors (and in camp trailers) molding like their corresponding dishes. It might not be so bad except that I made sure to wash all of the towels before I left. Washed and folded. All of them. Somehow, two kids (give or take?) got them ALL dirty. I will omit names to protect the guilty from ever getting hired or married, knowing in doing so that all four heathens are implicated. Guilt by association I guess. [And don’t pretend that one of those cereal bowls wasn’t yours, left in the sink as you dashed out of town for two weeks.]

It was one thing when they were little. Learning curve, right? Kids need parents to teach them how to keep things clean, if I was gone, things fell apart. But now that they’re all 16 and older - most of them legal adults, I am keenly aware of my failure to raise decent roommates. It’s mortifying. To whomever has to live with them, that isn’t me: I apologize.

The worst part about all of this is that I announced my return. I told them to clean it up before I got home. When the response to the family group chat was overwhelmingly “not it”, I even assigned tasks to the ones who I knew had been actively contributing to the mess. Lost cause. Not a dish was washed. Not an empty chip bag thrown in the trash. The same Mr. Nobody that made the mess would also not be cleaning it up. So I did. In addition to my two jobs and paying all of the bills for all of the things, I cleaned it up.

It didn’t help that all of this transpired right as I am in the middle of scrambling to get expensive repairs done around the house because my homeowners insurance will be dropped if I don’t have a huge old tree removed and fix the roof. Also the refrigerator keeps freezing giants sheets of ice that I have to chip out of the bottom every two weeks until I figure out how to buy a new one.

I contemplated changing the locks on my house so they can’t get in. I thought about packing up all of the dishes so they can’t use them. I did hide almost all of the towels out of reach once I RE-WASHED them.

Since then, after I cleaned the mess up, they’re either temporarily scared enough that they’re cleaning up behind themselves or they’re avoiding my kitchen like the plague. Evidence of their continued use of the bathroom exists in the form of bizarre stains on the sink and toilet that are either hair dye or charcoal masque remains but could easily double for demon slobber. I know this carnage is new because I cleaned the whole bathroom on Thursday and came home to black splooges everywhere on Sunday. I also washed and folded all five face washcloths and put them away, knowing only one kid would be home and thinking they’d be preserved. False. Only two remain. I found one, lying on the bathroom floor like a rejected prom queen. The other one is molding in a dark and secret place somewhere.

I have some video footage of the messes. Messes made and not cleaned up by adults. I almost posted the video to FaceBook and tagged them all in it but realized that their future/hopeful employers/spouses might see it and it could ruin the possibility of them ever being completely self reliant.

Everybody talks about enjoying kids while they’re young because it goes by so fast and then… well, basically, they’re the same but just bigger. I know my mom still has the same hair-rending frustrations with me that she did when I was 12 (although my shortfalls are much more endearing than the ones my kids have, right?), and I don’t expect there will ever be a moment when I wake up to the sudden realization that my kids are completely perfect, independent adults. They’ll always be my kids. And I will always get to yell at them for stuff. And they will always be mad about it. But maybe it will make us all better people in the long run. You know, people who clean up after themselves. Maybe.