That, my friends, is how the brain of a teenage girl works.
The other night, we had a bit of a stand-off over here. The Teen is pretty much like any teenager, in that she’s rather slow to action when asked to do something that involves any, you know, work on her part. So generally, when a laundry basket of her clean clothes is left in her room to be put away, it takes anywhere from 3 days to well over a week. Everything else is a priority above the laundry. Fair enough. I hate laundry, too.
The Husband? He has less patience for this.
So the other night, instead of bringing the laundry basket into her room, for her to studiously avoid over the next week, he dumped all of her clean clothes on her bed. You know, so she would have to put them away before she slept.
This did not go over well.
There was the usual moaning and gnashing of teeth, sure, but then she took us down a winding path of crazy, teenaged logic that was positively Oscar-worthy. I was in the next room, nursing baby C, but overheard the whole hilarious thing. Follow me on this journey, if you will:
To preface, she currently has a bum knee, which has limited her mobility. She’s on crutches, so kneeling and bending are currently out of the equation. Obviously this means she can’t put her laundry away. She is completely incapable of sitting on her bed and folding it. Or sitting on her desk chair in front of her drawers and leaning forward to put clothing into them. Don’t ask why! She. Just. Can’t.
The Husband then offers to help her by putting away her clothing for her. NO! This would be mortifying. Why? BECA– USE. He can’t see inside her drawers! AUGH. But, he isn’t going to look or….NO!
Okay. Well, the Husband says, there are two options: she can figure out a way to put her own clothes away (I CAN’T, DADDY!!!), or he can do it for her (NOOOOO!!!). The Husband then says he gives up, and that she can now do her own laundry and figure it out herself.
I think our next door neighbours heard her shriek.
With the laundry room being downstairs, and the Teen on crutches, doing her own laundry is obviously out of the equation. The Husband knew this when he said as much, he was just trying to force her hand. Little did he know. What followed was elegant and twisted and absolutely hilarious.
“I can’t put my laundry away, so I’ll have to try and sleep on the bed with it there, but it’s taking up so much room that I won’t get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll be exhausted at school. Then, when I run out of clean clothes and nobody does my laundry for me, I’ll only have dirty clothes left, and then I won’t be able to go to school, because I can’t go to school in dirty clothes. And then I’ll fail grade 9 and I’ll have to quit school, and I’ll never go to university.”
All because of the clean laundry on her bed.
Makes sense to me.
This post originally appeared on The Joy of Cooking (for Little Assholes) here.
Glynis Ratcliffe is a singer and writer by trade and a creative soul by birth. Together with her husband, they negotiate parenting a teenager, a threenager and a sweet baby who doesn’t know how the hell he ended up in this mess. Hilarity ensues. So do the meltdowns. Glynis’ writing can be found on The Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, The Mid, and BluntMoms. You can find her blog, The Joy of Cooking (for Little Assholes).