It Had To End In Disaster: Kids and Expectations

As soon as my wife started cleaning Clueless and Belligerent's room yesterday, a project that took her around three and a half hours, I figured it wouldn't end well. When she punctuated the activity at it's close with the words, "All she had better say to me about this is 'thank you,'" I expected the worst.

Before continuing with how the day went, I want to add two things: how it came to the point where we would directly interfere in their space and the similar situation with the other child. I'll start with her and then tell how it all started. Sullen and Moody's room is also a wreck. There are a couple of pieces of furniture in there that my wife repeatedly asks her not to cover with her laundry. Those were covered with indeterminably clean or dirty laundry. The floor was covered with scraps of paper and tissues (which is disgusting because that child cannot manage simple tasks like not just throwing her used tissues on the floor or stuffing them in the corner between her bed and the wall and the like, despite the fact that we took all of her belongings away from her for the entire duration of the summer as a punishment for this heavily recurrent problem). My wife, not wanting to get sick (which is what happens every time she cleans that child's room), simply cleared those pieces of furniture and made a pile of "fix this" in the middle of the floor. She also made a list of things to be fixed: clean up the tissues, get the dishes (some of which are growing mold and/or hidden from plain view) out of the room and wash them, hang up the clothing, take dirty laundry to the basket, generally straighten up, and vacuum the carpet (which will eventually have to be removed and probably burned). For how this exciting saga proceeded, stay tuned to the last half of this post!

How did it get this way? Socks. The children both claim that they have no socks. This makes no sense to us because we seem to buy them socks on an almost uncannily frequent basis, like they have some kind of sock-destroying ritual going on although we never see the destroyed socks or any evidence thereof. Their complaining and arguing (when we point out that they should have many pairs of socks, even clean ones) finally pissed us off enough that we decided to have direct intervention. I took care of dishes and kitchen-related cleaning while my wife attacked their rooms, cleaning Clueless and Belligerent's for her spectacularly (like it could be featured in a magazine of how properly trained children keep their rooms) and doing the above-mentioned actions in the disease-ridden other room.

Not surprisingly, my wife found seven pairs of clean socks and five pairs of dirty ones in C&B's room, most of which were near the bottom of piles of cleaned laundry that had been placed originally on the end of her bed with the instructions: please put these away nicely. Those piles were all stuffed in various and sundry places around the room: in corners, partly under/behind the bookcase, partly under the bed, and against the wall. On top of every pile were other things: books, stacks of half-crumpled "important" papers, dirty (and wet) laundry including towels, candy wrappers from candy we didn't give to the child, and general teenage-girl squalor. The only aspect of C&B's room that wasn't magazine-perfect when my wife got done were those socks, which were left out in neat rows on her bed, clean and dirty, as a sort of declaration of her retardation. Surprisingly, she threw very little away, save candy wrappers, and left much of the child's "organizational system" intact, if improved slightly. This presentation was left with a nice note: "I found your socks. They're on your bed, and we'll talk about where they were. Please put the dirty ones, unfolded, in the laundry basket, and put the clean ones away properly. I expect you to keep your room like this from now on. You're welcome. Love, Mama."

Incidentally, a similar scene, sans note, was provided in Sullen and Moody's room with the socks, about a dozen pairs of which were found in her room (without even having to search for them or do a thorough cleaning!) despite her frequent claims that she does not own enough socks because we lose them on her. Wrong.

C&B didn't come directly home from school. She asked to be allowed to hang out with her friends at the park (between the school and our house) for a few hours after school, giving a specific time that she'd be home. In fact Sullen and Moody didn't come directly home either, choosing to engage in her dorky Anime Club, an after-school activity that we're not sure is altogether healthy but that we consent to since she's allowed to have dorky interests (I played D&D as a teenager...). As to C&B, she even called at about an hour and a half until she was supposed to come home and asked to go to her friend's youth group meeting with her, so we said "okay," and expected not to see her until about 8:30 or so.

Meanwhile... Sullen and Moody came home and immediately went to her room. She cried out when she saw it: "My room has been ransacked!" I informed her that it had merely been adjusted in a manner that suggested what the problems were, that there was a note detailing those problems, and that she was to have it fixed in rather short order. She said, "Can I at least take a bath first, or do you think she [my wife] will flip out?" I consented to the bath. Bad move. I didn't take into account that despite her eczema and her knowledge that soaking it in hot/warm, soapy water for long periods of time being bad for it, the child takes obscenely long baths whenever given the slightest opening to do so, especially when stressed out about something or trying to avoid doing something she doesn't want to do. This one lasted two hours to my great frustration (I had to pee), though my wife didn't know anything about it because she was working (preventing me from using our other bathroom, which is in her office). I had somewhere to be and left the house before she got out of the tub... and before C&B came home.

I came home (much earlier than expected) to my wife looking frazzled. I asked her what was up, and she said that she "didn't want to relive it." Sullen and Moody was in her room, door closed, supposedly cleaning it. Clueless and Belligerent had gone toe-to-toe with my wife over the cleanup job and jab about the socks. First of all, somehow, there was a massive argument over the socks because C&B refused to recognize that those socks could have been in her room and insisted that they were planted there in an effort to make her look bad. Secondly, C&B was furious that people had touched her stuff (which makes me wonder what she has to hide). Thirdly, C&B was very upset about her very nicely organized closet and dresser and the fact that her clothes were neatly folded and put away or hung up in an organized fashion on hangers because she "doesn't like her clothes being like that"; she "likes them on the floor." She was told that we don't care what she likes, that her stuff is in our house, and that the socks were indeed hers and were indeed "lost" in her room (so she could stop accusing us of screwing up the laundry and losing all of her socks). She was in our bedroom on the phone, jabbering away, when I got home, but that was only after having been denied it for an hour while she was sent to her room to "stare at it so she'd know what it's supposed to look like."

The bathroom that Sullen and Moody had occupied, like her room, was now a mess. Water was everywhere, so three towels had been wontonly strewn on the floor to deal with the fact that she had splashed water everywhere (the child's idea, ostensibly since she doesn't have to wash the towels). There was an empty soda bottle on the edge of the tub, the shampoo and conditioner bottles were placed precariously along its edge or where they had fallen in the floor also, and there had been no obvious attempt to clean up any of this after herself. She won herself a prize, mentioned below, for her room and this. The bathroom is now cleaned, by our hands, save the soda bottle, which awaits her as a token of her failure and impending doom.

Now, we can fast-forward to this morning. What are the states of the three rooms in question?
Clueless and Belligerent: Some laundry is already piled on the floor, crinkled papers (some blank) are strewn about on top of various piles, and the magazine-perfect appearance of the closet has been destroyed so that a poster of something she was into four years ago (on the back wall of her closet) is visible.
Bathroom: Cleaned properly except the empty soda bottle, which is placed in a locale that annoys me every time I go in there: right where the child left it.
Sullen and Moody: The tissues are still on the floor, the bed is a wreck, the cleared-off furniture is home to some clothes again and the wet towel she dried her hair with after the two-hour bath, the dishes are still there (still molding in some cases) with two extras that somehow went in there yesterday under the radar and never came out, the pile in the floor is still there though it is now covered up with every clothes hanger that the child has in her room (symbol of a project started and not finished?), the vacuum cleaner is in there but has not been used, and somehow about a week's worth of dirty laundry is heaped on the floor, not in her room, but in the room adjacent to the room with the washer and drier in it (the basket is on top of the drier, not in this adjacent room).

The children win some prizes for this, though I don't know how it will go.
1) There is no longer any reasonable excuse short of bleeding for delaying any cleaning project for more than about eight seconds;
2) Magazine-perfection is required with no other activities permitted until it is achieved -- daily;
3) We'd include "dishes don't go in your rooms for any reason," but it's a prize they've already won and ignore because we don't have a good/effective/creative method for enforcing it;
4) They each will wash their own laundry (and socks) once weekly. In fact, we will no longer be washing their laundry under almost any circumstances;
5) Sullen and Moody no longer gets to take baths: showers are required.

Kids. Disaster.