It takes a lot for me to admit that I am wrong about something. In all fairness, I don't get much practice! Ask my husband. Growing up I thought that my mama exaggerated and overreacted about everything! If the laundry wasn't down to the laundry room every day then we would be overrun in dirty underwear and we would never have clean clothes to wear. If we threw extra junk food in the cart at the grocery store, we were literally going to go broke with the extra expense. If the dishes weren't cleared and washed immediatley after dinner then the bugs would take over the house and we would end up in something similar to an epsiode of hoarders. Of course all of these seem like outlandishly extreme statements, but now I completley get where she was coming from. I thought she was exaggerating. Turns out, she was right.
When I was a kid, I was convinced that my parents had kids so that they wouldn't have to do dishes or laundry anymore. In fact, I have even joked with Eric about looking forward to the day we could kick back and let the girls do the chores. It will be easy living in a few years. The girls can do all the laundry, and clean the kitchen while Eric and I sit back with a glass of wine and watch the grass grow. I thought thats what my parents did. Maybe...... just maybe..... maybe they deserved that quiet grass watching, wine drinking time. If their days were anything like my days maybe they deserve another bottle of wine.
The girls love to ask for stuff at the grocery store, now they are at the age where they throw stuff in the cart when I'm not looking. The stuff they want isn't always the most expensive stuff in the store, but goodness gracious it adds up fast! Growing up, I thought my mom was completley unreasonable. How in the world would a $2 lunchable, or a $3 pack of cookies bankrupt us? Now, my eyes have been opened into the world of adulthood, and motherhood. Food is freaking expensive!!! I thought my mother was trying to poison me by making me eat GENERIC foods. The thought of any peanut butter other than Peter Pan or Jiffy was horrifying. What in the world was the woman trying to do to us? Generic foods, I wouldn't touch them. Now my cabinets are stocked full of Great Value foods, and you know what I've learned as I've gotten wiser---- it tastes the same. Some food is definitley better when you get the name brand stuff... but now i'm a cheapskate and only buy it if it's on sale. Almost everything we get is generic. My younger self would be horrified. My kids will probably be horrified in about 10 years, after all--- they are just like me.
Turns out mom was also right about the laundry. Missing even 1 day of laundry in this house is disaster. How in the world do 4 people produce so much dirty laundry? I thought it was bad when the girls were babies and clothes would get covered in poop or spit up. Those were miniature clothes. Now they are almost full size people, who change clothes over and over and over again. I even locked their closet to keep the outfit changes to a minimum, but they still figure a way to make more laundry. I don't know how keeping clothes on for 30 minutes at a time makes an outfit dirty, but even when I go behind them to try hang a dress back up instead of putting it in the wash... I find out that even in a brief period of time, they have managed to get something crusted on it. Sometimes I decide that I have done enough laundry, and will take a day off. Then I usually pay for that stupid decision for a week! How does it pile up like that? Now I understand why mom would flip out if laundry wasn't done daily. We won't even discuss folding and putting laundry away. My mom was way better at that than I am. I will not confirm or deny the fact that laundry will sit on my couch for days waiting to be folded or put away. I will also not confirm or deny the fact that there are baskets full of clean clothes folded at the end of our bed because putting it away is such a miserable task. Mom was right. Laundry has to be done and put away daily.
If the food isn't done and dishes aren't put away right after dinner we will be overrun with bugs! This is another thing I thought my mom was out of control with. Surely dishes could sit in the sink and "soak" overnight while we watched TV or went outside to play with our friends. This was before the days of DVR.... if something was coming on TV that we wanted to watch, we had to watch it right then! We couldn't record it for later... unless we had a VHS tape handy. Lets be honest, we never wanted to record over what we had previously recorded so really we had to watch whatever was coming on right when it started. Dishes weren't a priority. As I have become wiser, I have learned that as soon as there is 1 dish left in the sink, the sink becomes a magnet for all of the dishes in the house. Even if the dishwasher is empty and ready to be run.... the dishes will end up in the sink for days. I think mama eyes are the only kind of eyes that can see a sink full of dishes though. I'm not sure that daddy eyes see full sinks, and kid eyes definitley don't see full sinks. Mamas may not have xray vision, but they have sink vision. A rare abililty to see a sink full of dishes despite an empty dishwasher less than 3 feet away. (Sink vision is also similar to trash vision. I think only mamas can see a full or overflowing trashcan.)
Every day I find myself becoming more and more like my mama. I say things and then cringe, because I can remember being told the exact same thing. Then I look at my daughters face, and I know exactly what she is thinking as she huffs and groans and grunts and stomps out of a room. She is just like me. I shouldn't be surprised when she backtalks me, or refuses to do what I tell her to do the first 50 times I tell her.... because she is just like me, and she probably has tuned me out until the 51st time I tell her. I know the moves she makes before she makes them, and yet somehow I have still become the overreacting, exaggerating mom. Then I call my mom to tell her these stories, and I know she is smiling on the other end of the phone. She has waited 28 years to hear that she was right. She knows what I'm going to say before she answers the phone because she had 3 girls herself. She laughs and laughs. 1 of my girls is just like me. Just like me in every single way. Heaven help me. 1 is just like my husband. Just like him in every single way. I've only been married to him for 5 years... I'm still trying to figure out how to handle him, now I have him and his mini him. Double trouble!
Who knew that my mom would have been right......
Who knew that I would admit it!
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