Chores have always been a part of my family’s dynamic. My brother and I have had chores since we were able to handle the responsibility, though our actual ability to handle responsibility is debatable to this day. Needless to say, we have not always done our chores well. At least not to my father’s standard which insisted on both cleanliness and initiative.
One would assume this emphasis on cleanliness would at the very least raise children who gave consideration to such things. Instead, it mostly fostered resentment when we 1) could not do things our way and 2) saw that the rule makers were not following the rules. I remember getting in an argument with my dad when I was around 10 or 11 because I had not done my chores at all. We were paid some allowance for doing the weekly chores and I logically responded that, “I didn’t need the money”. Angry, my dad responded that we didn’t do chores for money, we did them because we were all a part of the family and he gave us money just because he loved us. I don’t remember responding, but I do remember thinking that the reasoning was kind of illogical: the money was contingent on the chores but the two actions, doing chores and receiving money, were meant to be independent. That previous thought is my reasoning as a nineteen year old, what I probably thought at the time was, “that’s dumb”. The resentment only grew further when I saw that my list of chores grew as I got older as my father’s seemed to shrink. I could see many people objecting here, because you certainly should do more as you are able to for your family, but notice that I only said MY FATHER’S list shrank, not my mother’s. I definitely could stand to be more understanding here; my father has done more than enough for me in my life and he works all day and he doesn’t need to be doing a list of chores but the resentment was already there. Plus, he was still dictating HOW the chores should be done and only my mother was left to pick up the (inevitable) slack.
I am an extremely stubborn person, and I hate being told what to do. I will be the first to admit that I often NEED to be told, but I will never respond to a demand positively. I harbored such strong feelings every time I was told to do something that when my father did anything the tiniest bit hypocritical I wanted to explode. If I was told to clean the bathroom and my parents’ was filthy, I smoldered. If I was told to clean the kitchen and my father left his plate on the table I caught flame. And if I was told to clean my room and my father had a bedroom chair full of clothes, I was a Molotov cocktail ready to shatter. Being away for college has unfortunately not helped, and I still feel the same way.
My father spent the first few weeks of summer telling me if I was going to be home all day doing nothing I might as well clean. Then, during the next few weeks, I was told my room was filthy, that I needed to make my bed every morning, and that there was no reason for it to look that way. Therefore, I was already steaming last Friday at midnight when I went downstairs to get a drink and saw the pizza he had eaten for dinner sitting out on the stove. It wasn’t all his fault this time though, everyone but me had eaten the pizza, and everyone had gone upstairs, leaving two slices just sitting in the box. I moodily grabbed the pizza slices and began to wrap them in Saran wrap. I imagined the disaster that would have occurred had I NOT taken the initiative to wrap the two slices of cheap, Little Cesare’s pizza: the accusatory finger pointing, the escalation, the crying, the screaming, the kitchen aflame. It would have been madness, I assured myself, but I staved it off so graciously. I was so full of myself I was barely thirsty anymore when I remembered that’s what I came downstairs for in the first place. As I put the slices in the fridge, I turned to get a cup when I realized I had to go to the bathroom.
It was about 12:20am at my return from the bathroom, past when I would normally be in the kitchen so I had no way of knowing someone else staked their claim at this hour. As I went back for my glass, I was greeted by a giant reddish-brown cockroach sitting in front of the oven. The two of us seemed rather shocked to see each other. It was probably about 3 inches long, and so large I could see its antenna from the 2 feet away at which I cowered. I leaned my head a little closer and it began to move. I am proud to say I did not jump; rather, I began to shake, as the saying goes, like a freaking leaf. I considered running upstairs to get my parents out of bed to kill it, but I figured by then it would be gone into the night like a creepy, insect Batman, and I decided I’d rather take a shot at it then just leave it alive in the house to wind up in my bed. It was unlikely that it would climb the stairs and end up all the way at the back of the house to live in my room, but my shaky hands were not going to roll the dice on that one. And my dad was right, it HAD been a while since I vacuumed… So I bravely tip-toed, staying at a two-foot distance, to the kitchen table where someone had left a bottle of cleaner. Thank God no one ever puts anything away! I returned with my chemical weapon and got as close as I dared- and missed. My tormentor scuttled back behind the oven presumably to his giant cockroach domicile where him and his giant cockroach family sit in waiting to eat all the things we never sweep off the floor or all the leftover pizza that never gets put in the fridge. Waiting for midnight when we have all, supposedly, gone to bed.
I stood for a second before forcing my trembling hand to return my weapon to the countertop. And then I sprinted up the stairs, straight to my parents’ room where I recounted my daring tale. They listened, my mother laughed, and then my father jokingly and sleepily responds, “you better go get that cockroach from behind the oven”.
I am not cleaning that oven.
And I went to bed thirsty.