Over the summer I watched the teenager next door build a flowerbed in his family’s front yard. Throughout the year I watch him and his three younger siblings mow their lawn, rake the leaves and shovel the snow in their driveway. When they’re inside I imagine them dusting, vacuuming and talking about how their nosey neighbor lady is always spying on them.
I’m not nosey. What I am is nostalgic. When I’m watching them I’m thinking back to when I had a child at home to rake and vacuum for me. Those were the days—me delegating, knowing all would be done to my expectations and without complaint. I miss hearing my son say, “Yes Mother. I’d be happy to mop the kitchen floor. Would you like me to clean the bathroom too?”
Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Nor, I imagine, was it like that when my parents were assigning chores to me and my siblings. Nostalgia is, after all, the false sense that things were better when they happened so long ago we can’t remember them accurately.
I don’t know how it goes next door, but when I’m honest with myself, I know that the busier I was the less inclined I was to even ask my son for help. And the childrearing years were busy. Along with raising him, I was caring for my mother and working full-time. And the busier I got the less vital I considered some chores to be. It was hard to tell him to clean his room when he’d seen what mine looked like.
Plus teaching the skills necessary to complete certain tasks took time neither of us had. When he was in the middle of homework or extracurricular activities, I couldn’t very well teach him to cook. I probably couldn’t have anyway.
And like many other parents, I often found it easier and more efficient to just do it myself. When my son washed dishes, he needed to mop the floor too. Who had time for both?
Once when he was very young and his newly folded clothes looked more like a heap than a stack, I asked him if he was folding his T-shirts the way I’d taught him to. He said, “Mine are like snowflakes. They’re all different.” It was a lovely sentiment. Unfortunately, when every shirt was different, his dresser drawer wouldn’t close.
Delegating to older children often involves a fight. My son had only me and my husband to argue with. But a mother of two once told me about an argument that broke out between her son and daughter over whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. She intervened when she sensed the dishes were about to start flying across the kitchen.
Eventually the dishwasher was running and the children were in their bedrooms cooling off. All was well—until later that evening. When my friend unloaded the dishwasher she discovered, there among the clean dishes, a broken glass and a couple of really, clean chicken bones.
The kids next door are so well behaved and responsible. I can’t believe they ever fight about chores or run chicken bones through the dishwasher. I’m ashamed to admit this, but for some reason I’d be reassured to learn that they do. There’s only one way to find out. One of these days I’m going to sneak over and peek in the windows.