There is something every parent should know before they attempt this climbing-Mt-Everest-without-an-oxygen-pack-or-a-partner-or-warm-clothes task of tidying up a house: Children will follow along behind you and undo all your hard work.
There are a few times a year when I decide I’ve had enough of my filthy house. Most of these times are not weekends we’ve sent kids away with their grandparents and could actually tackle tidying and cleaning without kids underfoot, because who wants to spend a weekend without kids cleaning? Nope.
So most of the time, when I’m fed up with filthy, my kids are home, waiting to undo everything.
If both parents try to tackle the project, it’s much worse. One day Husband went upstairs to clean, while I was downstairs trying to clean, and no one was really paying attention to the 3-year-old twins, and they unraveled three rolls of toilet paper and tried to see how much of it they could stuff in the toilet with the plunger. I was in the kitchen, trying to scrub the counters that hadn’t been wiped down in too long by anyone other than an in-a-hurry-to-get-my-chore-done boy.
Once I turned on the vacuum cleaner, the boys saw it as their free pass to take out All the Stuff because Mama couldn’t hear them.
Every now and then—not often—I get a REALLY wild hair and decide I have to clean everything—under couches, under the stove, under the refrigerator, the tops of everything you can’t really see and usually leave to the dust. I’ll move all the furniture and find stockpiles of Hot Wheels and broken pencils and crayons and food they’re not even supposed to eat in the living room. The problem is, as soon as I pull any of it out, the boys take off with it. They’ll play with the cars, they’ll sharpen the pencils, they’ll eat month-old bread (I know. Gross). I don’t even have a chance to put it all in the trash before it’s already disappeared.
I guess, in reality, that saves me a step—putting it all away—but they really only end up displacing it somewhere else in the house, where it will most likely find its way back underneath the couch.
On these not-so-frequent, clean-everything days, I’ll tell them, “We’re cleaning the house today” but to them, these words have no meaning. That’s not true. They have meaning. It’s just a different translation.
Children don’t understand cleaning and tidying language.
“We’re cleaning the house today” means get out all the papers and scribble one little thing on them and call it finished, and then, when you’re tired of that, take out a few books to read and make sure you leave them on the floor, and then, when you’re tired of that, go outside and play for three seconds and bring in forty rocks for Mama—make sure you say they’re for Mama, because this is how you know they’ll definitely be kept, except this time Mama is being really mean, and she makes you take them back outside, and she’s the worst mother ever. Well, fine, you just won’t give her anything anymore, then. At least until you see those weeds in the yard with the purple flowers and pick them all so you can toss the bouquet at Mama, because she’s vacuuming, and it’s the perfect time to throw pretty things at her.
“No more toys out right now,” means, sure, Mama is cleaning, trying to pick up all the stray cars, and you’re not supposed to play with any toys right now, but there’s still the art cabinet, she didn’t say the art cabinet was off limits, so you go and take all the little cups with the crayons out, even though you only really need one, oh, and make sure you open the bottom cabinet and take out fifteen of the coloring books, even though it’s not even possible to color in that many at a time. Be sure to make the rest of them topple over so they fall completely out of the cabinet. Color for a few seconds, and then forget that’s what you wanted to do. Go upstairs to your room and find the hundred things you’re going to bring back down with you and then, when you’re bored with making that kind of mess, go into the pantry, because Mama’s not looking, and grab a mason jar of almonds and fill it with roly polies, after you eat all the almonds, of course, and then bring them back in and hide them in the pantry so Mama will never know you ate a half pound of almonds in one day.
“The bathroom is off-limits for the next thirty minutes” means Mama will be so focused on getting the urine—from toilet misses, not purposeful peeing on the floor—that you’ll be able to get into the games cabinet and take out Lord of the Rings Risk, with its billions of tiny little pieces, which you know she must hate, since she’s always telling Daddy they should get rid of it, and he’s always saying he can’t get rid of it, because when you’re older you’ll want to play it with him, and you think, of course, that it’s the best game ever, because A BILLION PIECES (!) you can spread all over the floor Mama just vacuumed. Make sure you dump them ALL out and, when you’ve put them all on the Middle Earth map, decide it’s probably time for a break, and leave the pieces where they are so your 3-year-old brothers can knock them all off and they’ll slide under the couches and make Mama mad—but you’re off the hook, because the twins did it.
“I’ll only be upstairs for a minute” means you now have the opportunity to follow along behind Mama as she picks up every single stray book on the library floor and shelves it, biding your time until she moves into your bedroom to make sure it’s clean, and then your little brothers’ bedroom to make sure they didn’t empty the closets again. Wait until she’s in her bedroom, because she always gets stuck in there, and then pull down all those titles in the Harry Potter series, because before you start to read one of them, you must, naturally, see them all. Leave them on the floor, because book carpets are the best.
“Everybody stay out of the dining room” means that while Mama’s wiping down the table and cleaning all the glass, it’s your job to sneak all those cups down from the cabinet and fill them with water and put three of the Lord of the Rings Risk pieces in them and then into the freezer to see what happens to figurines when they freeze. Mama will probably never notice. Grin to yourself, because you’ve just successfully thwarted all your parents’ efforts to clean and tidy the house.
This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)
