As you can see, I have labeled this post Rant and Rave - take one.That's because I already know that there will be a take two - and perhaps even a three, four, and five.
Last night (well actually in the wee hours of the morning) as I lay awake suffering from my Nomadic Sleep Disorder, I got a little worked up about something that had recently happened with my teenage daughters. As so, in the clarity that only comes at 3:00 a.m., I plotted today's post in which I was going to rant and rave about the money those young ladies had spent.
But yet, as I groggily stepped foot in my bathroom this morning - preparing to shower - I vaguely remembered that I needed to grab a clean bath towel because someone had smeared makeup (or so I hope) on my previous towel - causing me to throw it prematurely into the laundry hamper.
And so I paddled to my daughters' bathroom. . .
Knock. Knock.
The daughter with the long brown, perfectly-straightened hair answered. ( I know, all three of my daughters have long brown hair, but we're talking about the one whose hair is always perfectly-straightened.) I tell this particular daughter that I, Just need to grab a towel out of the linen closet.
She informs me that there are no clean towels in the linen closet.
Now ladies and gentlemen, I had occasion - just this past summer - to do a census of bath towels at our disposal in this house. The result of my investigation revealed that we had 32 bath towels residing in the house with us.
That's right, 32!
And not one of those 32 towels was clean, dry and ready for use this morning. (I need to admit that perhaps two of those towels were in my laundry hamper - one, of course, being smeared with brown makeup - leaving the other 30 towels to be somewhere in my daughters' bedrooms!)
And this little lack of towels, my friends, was just the start of my inauspicious morning . . .
Let me continue. . .
It seems only to make sense that a full-time working mother like myself would need a little help around the house from time to time. And so, every other Wednesday, a cleaning service comes to help out. (You can't envision my daughters with a vacuum in their hands - now can you?)
So the day before the cleaning service is to arrive, I begin to warn my daughters that their rooms need to be free of errant clothing so that the vacuum can touch the carpeting. And yet, for the last three-or-so-every-other-Wednesday mornings, a least one of my daughters had snookered me on their way out the door - assuring me that her room was "clean" when really it had been left a mess. And so, yesterday - determined not to be fooled yet again - I asked the daughter with the perfectly straightened hair (a.k.a. Trigger Finger Girl) not once, but three times, when she was going to ready her room for the cleaners. In return, I got the following answers: (1) Later! (2) Chill! and (3) I'll do it Mom! I promise!
Well, after the little bath towel incident, where do you think my feet paddled to next? You guessed it - her bedroom - which could have legally been declared a disaster area. (I know what you're thinking. . . . but even if I broke one of my cardinal rules about no photos on this blog, you would still be missing the sense of smell, and hence, would still not get the full effect.)
And so I pulled a trick from my older sister's playbook, went to the garage, and grabbed the box of big black trash bags. After extracting 18 (yes, 18!!!!!!) bath towels from the dispirit piles of clothing behind her bed, on the floor of her closet , and just plain-old strewn all over the carpeting, my husband and I filled two of those huge bags with her clothes!
I'm sorry faithful followers, but I feel like I've hit the final BEEP on the answering machine tape. . . the rest of the story is just too long for me to convey in one single night (especially because it ended with me crying in my wine with a good friend) so I'll have to ask you to tune in again.
Until tomorrow. . .
