PenPenWrites

I am awash in guilt. My daughter-in-law is having a problem with my son's personal "clean-up" habits. He does not place his dirty laundry in the basket provided at a convenient place for him. It has led to great annoyance on her part–and even some good-natured retaliation, which I learned about from a Facebook entry he posted.

My DIL had sent my son an email addressing the issue. Riffing on a book he wrote about teaching techniques, she emailed him a photo of that morning's laundry basket with his dirty socks lying nearby and then wrote: "I'd like you to try again at the end of the day to nail the laundry in the basket thing we've been working on. I'm giving you the opportunity to show me how much you've improved! POW. Technique 39."

His Facebook item noted that, upon seeing the photo, he was unsure whether it did or did not suggest he had shown some improvement. He showed the photo (not the idealized version above) to two female colleagues, both of whom assured him it was overwhelming evidence that he was doing a poor job.

Well, it turned into a very amusing Facebook entry (for those of us who know my son), and we who saw it–including many of his colleagues–got a good chuckle out of it. But when I talked to my DIL a few days later, she wasn't laughing.

She was frustrated about the mess he was leaving for her to pick up and she had had enough of it. That's where my guilt came in. I remembered, too clearly, what a messy kid he had been–how he left his dirty laundry on the floor of his room: just stepped out of his jeans and left them as they were, along with the tee shirts he'd worn and, of course, the underwear and socks. I had just let it all sit there till he couldn't walk around in his room anymore–on the theory that that would encourage him to clean up. Evidently, it didn't work. When I mentioned this early "training" to my DIL she tried not to be aghast or to put the blame on my shoulders, though clearly some of it belonged there.

I am sure–at least I think I am sure–that she does not want me to intervene in this squabble, that she was just letting off steam in a safe place. And I do feel for her. But also for my son. No question, he should put his dirty laundry in the basket, not around it, and that he should support his wife when she sends the same message to the children. But having grown up with a neat-freak mother–much more of a "you will do it my way" housekeeper than my DIL–I know how impossible it can be to meet expectations and sometimes to not even know what those expectations are. Though in this case, there are no excuses: Dirty laundry is either in the basket or it's not. How could he not know that? Didn't his mother teach him anything?

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