This will be a free flowing, run-on randomly ordered narrative of things my Step kids do that make me crazy. It will hopefully be something you can identify with, at least in part, and maybe it will be entertaining at the same time.
Selective hearing. I fail to see how the same children who do not hear me when I ask them to do something over and over and over again can hear a text tone from clear across our house. They can sit and look right at me, nod up and down in complete acknowledgement of what I say and fail to execute my directive or to get my point. I can call them to dinner five times, nothing. Yet let me say I’m running to the store, and they hear that! Can you get me a…or I want to go too. I have come to the opinion that if it’s important to them or benefits them in any way their ears work. If something is said and it requires work, effort, sacrifice or some selfless act on their part, not so much. I’ll bet if I said hey look, $20, do you want it….they’d hear that!!
Memory lapses. I can ask my children to do something and they act as if they understand the request. At a frequency level of about 5% they will follow through, no second request needed from me and no real lag time between my request and their action. But 5% is a failing grade is it not? These memory lapses are really quite remarkable to observe. “Hey Child, next time you go upstairs, please take your shoes out of the middle of the kitchen floor and put them in your room”. “Ok” says Child. Maybe 10 minutes later Child goes upstairs, shoes stay in kitchen. Child comes back downstairs and I say “Hey Child, didn’t I ask you to take your shoes with you the next time you went upstairs”? Child says “Oh, yeah, sorry”. We’ll have to go through this same sequence on average four times to actually get the request carried out. “Guys, would one or both of you please empty the dishwasher so you can put your dirty dishes in it, instead of in the sink as you use them through the day”? “Sure”. I get ready to leave the house, and I say it again with the same answer back. “Sure”. Let’s say I’m gone for 3 hours. I come home and the dishwasher hasn’t been unloaded and the sink is piled high with all the dirty dishes they have made. I say to my daughter, as I see her sucking on a spoonful of peanut butter, and I see the jar open still and out on the counter; “Please put the peanut butter jar back when you’re done” which elicits an “I know” on her part and a roll of her eyes. I go and do something else for a while and then come back to the kitchen. She’s nowhere around and there sits that jar. Seriously. “Girls, I have a load of laundry in the dryer, would you please do me a favor? I know you are doing a load of wash, but when you take our clothes out of the dryer to put yours in, would you please fold them instead of just throw them in a big wad into the laundry basket”? “OK”, they say to me. I come back home after running out for whatever reason and there are our clothes in a big ball in the laundry basket all wrinkled so that now I have to take care of it. Girls! “What did I ask you to do with our clothes when you took them out of the dryer”? “Oh, sorry” is what I get in response. “Guys, please don’t eat the taco chips in the pantry, I’m using them for the dinner I’m making”. “Ok”, they say. I go to work. I come home, not having stopped at the store because I know I have all I need to fix dinner that night and what do I find? They have eaten the bag of chips. “Guys! ” I say in an elevated tone, “where are the chips I asked you not to eat this morning”? “Oh, was that dinner tonight”?, they say. You feel my pain, and if you have teenagers too, I feel yours.
Sloppiness. We have one kid who is pretty good at keeping things in their place if we’re talking about her room, or the main part of the house if she wants something. Our oldest son is a lost cause. Trash, clothes, food everywhere he goes. A cloud floats above him, sort of like Pigpen from the comic strip. According to the girls there is no place in his car for them to sit because of the junk and clutter. I don’t doubt that but I choose not to look and see for myself when he’s home. I don’t want to see it I don’t think. Our other daughter is a lot like her brother in the sloppiness department. I have been getting after these kids since about the second month I was dating their Dad. It was just ridiculous. They left stuff everywhere! I continue to get after the girls because they still live with me. As for our oldest, when he’s home for break we have an agreement. I won’t go downstairs for those few days…he makes an attempt to put it back in some semblance of order when he leaves. He fails on many levels to do that, but he at least he makes a feeble attempt. I want to mention our cars. The first time I got in my boyfriend’s van, I could see that clearly the van actually belonged to his kids and that Dad wasn’t real good at enforcing picking up after yourself. After we had been together a while and got serious, we bought a nice Honda Oddessey, all the bells and whistles. I told the kids we WILL take care of this vehicle. “Ok!” Yeah, sure. Every gum wrapper, drink cup, candy wrapper, empty plastic water bottle, hair pin, hair tie, headband, sports wrap, ankle brace, wrist brace, sock, shoe, shirt, jacket, pair of shorts, necklace, bag of cereal, Baggie of snacks, cracker box, juice box, Gatorade bottle, chap stick, lip gloss, fingernail polish and nail file, ear ring, bracelet, or cough drop you can possibly imagine has been left in this vehicle. I have been saying for years and they don’t know it yet but I SOOO mean it that when we spring for them a car, the first thing I’m going to do is go out to it, turn the radio station on whatever I want, move the seat way way up and leave all my crap in it. You know what they say about payback! My parents would never have allowed such a thing to occur, but then again I don’t remember wanting to treat our cars like that nor did I treat my own that way when I got one.
Doing something half a..sed. You know what I’m saying. I say to one of my children, “hey could you do me a favor and clean the kitchen”? I get the look but also I get “ok”. Or I’ll say “would you guys dust for me, one dust and maybe the other run the vacuum”? So they do, and I have a look, nothing at all what I had hoped for. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t every single time, but it is most of the time. Absolutely the least amount of effort humanly possible is what they’ll usually put forth. I have told them before, heck I’d almost rather have you tell me no. At least I’d know where I stood and what to expect! We have a couple of long haired dogs, and hard wood floors. I sweep daily, sometimes twice daily and brush them just to try to keep up with it. I don’t even ask the girls to sweep anymore. The few times I did they were so lame duck about it, it made me mad so I just do it myself. Why is it that when my kids are asked to scoop the yard, five minutes later when I scoop, I can find an entire trash bag full of dog poop? I got tired of it, so now I pay someone else to do it.
And finally we come to a category I shall just call stupid stuff. Why why why can’t these people put the dad gummed toilet paper roll onto the holder? I mean what is the deal? I have even held lessons on this, no go. What is so difficult about the concept of picking up after yourself? Look. If when you entered a room, and no one else was in there, and when you get ready to leave that room, something is in it that wasn’t there when you walked in, put the room back the way you found it. To me, that isn’t real hard to grasp. To others? If I have said once I’ve said a thousand times. Keep the sink clear please and if you cook something clean it up. Doesn’t happen. they can do the cook part, just not the other part. I will pick a glass up put a coaster under it, only to watch that same glass be picked up, drank from and put back down off the coaster and back onto the wood table. Not once, but over and over and over. Our bedrooms are all upstairs in this house. I finally found the need to put a basket at the base of the stairs. When I pick up something they have left downstairs and it needs to go back up, I’ll put it in that basket. When I put the basket in place, I explained the concept to them and said when they go up, they need to try to keep that basket emptied out. Doesn’t happen. I promise you they would rather spend their own money to replace something they haven’t been able to find for a while, rather than think to look through that basket. It only gets emptied when I ask them to empty it like five times in a row and then I stand there till they get up and do it. One of the girls uses the last of the hand soap in the bathroom. She knows I buy refills, she knows where they are located. What does she do? She fills the dispenser with water. She does it all the time even though I have taught a class on it. When I go to clean out the refrigerator, I remove some 5-10 plastic bottles with one maybe two swallows of whatever it is still in there. Why do they have no issue about wasting water, food, electricity, gasoline, paper, soap etc etc yet feel that it is very very wrong to waste that last sip of their beverage? Why do our kids wait until 9:00pm on a Sunday night to tell us they need 2 yards of fabric or 3 poster boards for school the next day? Are you kidding me? Why do our girls bring the car home with the amber out of gas light in full blaze yet swear they didn’t see it. Trash, the trash. I have watched my children spend 3 minutes using every creative way they can, to cram just one more piece of garbage into an obviously full trash can when it would actually be easier and faster to just empty the trash, I guess it’s the challenge! Our kids can look out of the window before school, see snow falling in a harsh cold wind and choose from their closet a pair of shorts, flip flops and a short sleeved T and dance out of our house without a jacket. Yes sir they sure can! And then act shocked and insulted when we send them back to their rooms to put on clothes that make sense. Our kids don’t know what coats are for, what hats are, how to wear gloves or what a scarf is. These are foreign concepts to them, things only their parents and old people use. After being instructed for the last several years to rinse their plates off before putting them in the dishwasher, why can’t they do it? It’s not only me who tells them that it’s bad for the dishwasher but also the dishwasher installer, after the early demise of the last one, tells them the same thing. They can not wrap their brains around this concept. They qualify as serial killers now because they have killed 3, they just don’t get it. Dishwasher…disposer…dishwasher…disposer. I’ve tried, really I have! Oh and Flush!!!!!!!!!!! I mean our toddler gets that! Our daughters started doing their own laundry but only because they wear underwear they don’t want their Dad to see. True, I know because they told me. I thought this was a good thing and it is really, it’s just that regardless how many times we yell at them for it, they will actually remove our wet clothes from the washer, place in a laundry basket and leave it. We find it, and it has mildewed. This hasn’t happened just once or even just twice. So you hang your heavy wet towels over your shower rod and it crashes down. So you hang your wet heavy towels on your shower rod and it crashes down so you hang your wet heavy towels over your shower rod and it crashes down, so you hang your wet heavy towels over your…you get the picture. My 16 year old girl, after being repeatedly asked by me to vacuum her room, literally turned the vacuum on, let it sit and run then turned it off and moved it to the top of our staircase, done she says. I go upstairs to compliment her and viola, no vacuum marks, lint in the floor and clothes on the floor. So which is it, she thinks I’m dumb as a rock or she’s the rock, I don’t know, you tell me. Neither of those please me necessarily!
Lessons learned
- Kids now adays, for the most part, have been over indulged. I don’t know why, where it started or the psychology of it all, I just know that it’s true. This isn’t true of all kids of course, but for many,including mine, that is certainly the case. It has caused them to be self centered, short of attention, thoughtless and short sighted. I hope they grow out of it or they will be in for a rude awakening once they are out on their own.
- We’ve done too much for these kids. My husband has shared with me, stories about how when he was young he worked to help support his family, how little fun he had because he was always worried about his younger siblings having enough; it has in fact robbed him of the ability to really have fun and truly feel happy. He can do it in spurts, but God love him he struggles. I know I was very involved in taking care of my brother, my father and our home by the age of 12, including laundry, cooking, cleaning and care giving. To our oldest son’s credit, from the age of 16 he has always worked. His sisters are almost 17 and have never held a job. Part of this is that their school and mostly their extra curricular activities are heavier than his were but part of it is their Dad not wanting them to feel they have to do that while trying to get through school.
- We each bring our own personal experiences to parenting. Funny with us because although my husband’s experience and mine weren’t so different, I came out of it expecting our kids to be equally capable of shouldering responsibility, he came out of it wanting to spare them as much of that as possible. Interesting isn’t it?
- I love these kids. Sometimes to hear me prattle on you’d think otherwise. At times though, I don’t pretend to understand them and I’m sure they say the same about me!
I hope you got a chuckle out of reading all this, man I feel better!!
Good StepMom
