Running In Place

My husband and son are having a nearly heated argument about the boy cleaning his shit-hole of a bedroom.  The kid is coming up with some very passionate arguments about his “system,” which evidently includes filing folded up pieces of paper “that one of his teacher’s might ask for” all over the floor.  This system also extends, apparently, to the mix of clean and dirty clothes strewn about.  And don’t even ask about the closet, believe me that you don’t want to know.  The kid is pointing out to the old man that you can’t exert your ”value system” on another person - and that the two of them have a different value system.  The old man is pointing out that he is not asking him to worship a different god or change his ideological beliefs - just to pick the crap up off of his floor.  

Here is me, on the porch, listening - screaming inside my head but keeping my mouth clamped tight.  My contribution would likely be of the “I PUT A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD,” or “YOU NEVER LIFT A FINGER AROUND HERE” or better still “YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WHEN YOU HAVE YOUR OWN PLACE.”  Whether my argument is right or wrong, it will add nothing but ill feelings to the debate at hand.  So I sit, and grit the teeth, and know that the old man will prevail because he rarely lets ‘nearly heated’ become an actual argument.  He meets accusations with measured responses, addresses sarcasm with rationales, asks challenging questions when faced with faulty logic.  I remember having these exact same arguments with my mother - but she pulled the authoritarian line with me and my room got cleaned by me because the alternative was her cleaning it for me, with a Hefty bag (and it wasn’t an idle threat, she had done it).  So, although I quite strongly suspect that the kid’s arguments regarding his filing system and his values are somewhat (maybe mostly) related to not wanting to attack the huge project of putting that 12′x12′ dump into some semblence of order, the other piece of it - and perhaps the most significant - is his sense of autonomy.  I hoisted the “It’s MY Room!!” argument on my mom and although a part of it was fueled by straight-up laziness, another part really was about what I considered to be a piece of my value system at the time - that being that neatness and order and cleanliness and, maybe most of all, keeping up appearances, was not as important to me as it was to her.  So, although my first, reactionary instinct is to say he’s avoiding cleaning his room out of sheer laziness, I have to recognize that those ”value” arguments are not necessarily the smoke screen that it would be easy to catagorize them as.  Sure, we could say Dammit, clean up your room because I said so!!  We are the parents and we supposedly have that right.  But the kid is 17, he’s not hardly a kid anymore.  Shit, I was out on my own by the time I was his age - and my first apartment was a mess.  I lived out all that slovenliness just like I had always wanted the right to do.  And it got old after not too long.  Maybe forcing him to clean his room is not necessarily teaching him some important life lesson.  Maybe it’s easier to just close his bedroom door when company comes - not because it’s easier to not have to fight about it, but easier because in the end, he’ll find his own way through.  If his filing system really and truly is folded up pieces of paper on the floor then so be it, if it’s really not - he’ll let go of the pretense and find what truly works for him……eventually.  Unfortunately, probably not while living in this house.  *sigh*