Wednesday, June 09, 2010

When parenting is your mother

I'm trying to get the girls to clean their room in under 6 hours so it can be vacuumed & the sheets changed before bedtime. I'm asking a lot of the universe, I know. I can't even help them--no one over 4 feet tall can get in there at this point. I just stand in the doorway and urge them to focus on categories: dirty clothes, trash, dress-up stuff, books, legos. I go from screaming to encouraging to criticizing to single word directives. This is so hard on all of us. I hate it. The categories are the only improvement I've made to the hideous routine, learned from my mother. I KNOW it has everything to do with my serious avoidance of housework that has always kept me from enjoying any of my homes. Oh, and I try to keep my lectures shorter.