Perspective: strife caused by clutter
Mothering teenagers
Every day I am irritated by the unwashed lunch containers she leaves on the kitchen counter. Who will wash it? Who will put it away?
It irks me, the clutter on the counter.
The next morning, she asks me if I would make her breakfast. I glance at the unwashed lunch containers and suggest she bring a hot lunch to school today.
“But you have to wash your containers first,” I remind her.
This scenario doesn’t happen often. Mostly, it doesn’t happen at all. Instead, what happens is one of two things:
I rage-clean it myself while simultaneously lecturing her about expectations, or
I ignore it which incites me into a negative mental headspace
The lunch containers are one of many items that clutter my space. When I am not in my room with a door at my mom’s house in the suburbs, I work from the dining room table adjacent to the kitchen. There is no other space for me to work.
From that vantage point, I can see the clutter in my peripherals. Inevitably, I find myself distracted and unable to concentrate.
I know this is my problem, and a solvable one:
My issue is not with the clutter per se; my issue is my lack of focus and attention.
I use clutter as an excuse - a psychological crutch - not to get my work done.
Reflecting on this ongoing issue, I turn to semantics. Words, after all, preoccupy me continuously and endlessly.
What I call mess and clutter, they call normal family life.
If only it were that simple…
One day, I complained to the co-parent. He listened but remained silent. He’s heard my broken record too many times to count.
This enrages me. Why am I alone in my attempts to keep the communal areas clean and tidy?
Inadvertently, I shift from airing my grievances to blaming him for playing a part.
“When you clean up after her, you’re enabling her,” I accused him. He does that sometimes; he will wait until I vacate the premises and then tackles the few chores we assigned to the kids, who are, it must be said 18 and 16, and does it himself.
He doesn’t understand why this feels like twisting the knife in my back.
As I continued my grievances, he waited until I came up for air. When I finally paused, he said something that, perhaps for the first time, stumped me into silence.
Do you want to continue to go on about this with her, knowing it'll cause friction, or do you just want to accept it?
I was momentarily stumped. On the one hand, he was right. This lunch thing has been a bane of mine for years, but particularly since they entered high school. Despite my insistence our teenagers should contribute to the many household chores which keep their/our home functioning, they don’t seem to clue in that a kitchen filled with constant clutter is a part of that expectation.
Clearly, it doesn’t bother them. It only bothers me.
Kids today have money in their pockets (they both have/had jobs). If a portable school lunch is not available (and I admit, I don’t mind making her a nutritious lunch for school), they just buy one. Or they don’t eat and stop on the way home and pick up some junk.
This, too, bothers no one but me.
But maybe there’s something about his statement. Maybe letting it go, casting it aside as a relatively unimportant irritation in the grand scheme of things, is a way to avoid continuing strife.
Maybe I needed to hear, and acknowledge, this perspective in the name of maintaining peace and harmony in my family.