Not bitter

I’m not exactly sure how many people slept in my house last night but I did wake up to three recent high school grads in my living room, sprawled on the sectional, and when I knocked on my daughter’s door and peeked into her room, she and a friend were sound asleep.  At this very moment seven or eight teenagers are playing games around my kitchen table.

All I really did today was drive people around.  I took my son to work, drove to our church for a work-day (but did no work because I arrived so late), then drove another son home from the church.  After an hour or so at home, I drove my daughter’s friend home (30 minutes away!) and then after I dropped off my daughter, went to pick up my son from work.  By then, it was after 4 PM.

Some people actually participate in recreational activities on Saturdays!  Not me!  But I’m not bitter!

You know what also doesn’t make me bitter?  The fact that my kids do not revere my vast years of experience nor treasure my unsolicited advice.  Some of them even accuse me of being critical but listen, I just call it as I see it.  For instance, if your shirt is too tight or your teeth look grimy, I might point that out, in love, of course.

This is what I’m learning, though.  Adolescent and twenty-something children do not want to know what you really think about things.  Actually, they just don’t care what you think about things.  You are as irrelevant as a rotary-dial telephone.  What do you know about clothing and relationships and how to act in public?  Nothing!  Why are you even looking at me like that, MOM? 

Whatever. As I said, I’m not bitter.

Mostly, tonight I’m just grateful that all the children that belong to me are safely under my roof along with half a dozen of their closest friends.

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(For fun, I’m running a little experiment in my household.  Usually, I cart down the extremely heavy and always overflowing hamper of dirty laundry from the upstairs bathroom where four of my kids deposit damp bath towels and their dirty clothes.  Then I wash, dry, fold and sort the folded clothes and towels into baskets.  I don’t mind doing laundry and folding it.  But I really get tired of carrying that super heavy hamper downstairs.  So I decided not to do it.  I’m waiting to see how long it will take one of the big strong young men who live in this house to notice it and bring it downstairs.

I find this very amusing, but that’s what happens when you get old and possibly semi-bitter and have nothing better to do with your time–when you aren’t driving kids around, cooking dinner, working full-time and reading–than to conduct social experiments on the unwitting young people who live in your house.  My hypothesis?  The laundry basket will never ever be brought downstairs and the kids will start going commando and drip-drying after showers.)