MOTHERING

On Living With Squalor, Teen Style

by Fern Kupfer

I thought about it when I found the frozen dinner moldering in Katie'scloset three weeks after she had left for summer camp. "How can shepossibly live like this?" I asked my husband.

Right after I said it, I remembered my father saying the same thingto me when I was about 15, my room a mass of clothing and scatteredcosmetics. Ah, teenage squalor. My father used to call me a slop-a-roo,a term of semi-affection that he must have made up since I've neverheard it anywhere else. My mother early gave up the fight. She tried topretend that the aberration that was my room was not actually part ofthe rest of the house. She used to tell people: "I just close Fern'sdoor."

My father, stricter and less tolerant, had a method. He would say:If that room is not cleaned by the time I get home from work, you willbe very sorry.

Although my father did not hit, he somehow conveyed the impressionthat the punishment would hurt. It did. My father would come home fromwork, march upstairs and, if the room was not cleaned, proceed to emptyevery drawer, every tabletop and bookshelf, everything that was in mycloset and put it all into a pile in the middle of the room. I remembercoming home to find a mountain of my belongings on the floor. I think heonly had to do that a couple of times.

It seemed so unfair. It was my room, I reminded him. And I shouldhave been able to keep it any way I wanted. My father countered that theroom was in his house, that he paid the bills and that the room I wastemporarily occupying had to measure up to his specifications: bed made,clothing hung up, all those unreasonable demands that made me promisemyself I would never be so uptight when I was an adult. I told him so.His response: "When you have your own house, you can live in garbage upto your knees for all I care."

So what's my house like now that I'm a mortgage-paying adult? Well,it's neat. Quite neat, actually. No clothes on the floor, no piles ofjunk mail on the desk. My husband (whose standards are somewhat loose,it's true) says our kitchen counters are clean enough to perform surgeryon. No slop-a-roo here.

But now there're these teenagers I live with. What are their roomslike? Well, usually the rooms look as if Huns and Vandals have done adrive-by invasion. Clothes everywhere. Food in various stages ofdecomposition, papers, wet towels, hair blowers, magazines, books, CDs- well, "strewn" does not not exactly describe it.

Once we had an unmarried friend over who ventured to the upstairsbathroom and passed by the girls' rooms. She came down, stunned. "Ithought perhaps you had been burglarized," she said. "Their rooms seemed. . .," she searched for the word, ". . . ransacked."

(I sometimes wish that burglars would come to the house. Then atleast, they would take something.)

"How can you live like this?" I ask the girls, on the occasion whenI venture upstairs and see them happily reading on the floor surroundedby dirty laundry, candy wrappers, old pop cans. "It's my room," eachgirl counters. "Why can't I keep it however I want?"

The question remains: Should teenagers have to clean their rooms? Ifso, how often? And what exactly does "clean" imply? Do we want childrento have tidy rooms because we would prefer it or because we believe theyneed training in organization and domestic responsibility? Is cleaningtheir rooms a character issue? A health issue? And is letting the roomsgo, for the domestic peace it engenders, a trade-off or a capitulation?

I don't know. And what we end up doing in our family depends on theday you ask. Once a week, when the house gets cleaned by professionalhelp, the girls are expected to pick up, bring down the dishes they'veaccumulated over a week's time, empty their trash. (Once a week, anothermother of teens told me is really good.) But sometimes the kids beg off:They have aerobics or a special party or sudden and voluminous homework.Well, OK, I say, "just put a note on the door `Please Do Not Clean,' soCheryl and Marlene won't go in."

The cleaning women, Cheryl and Marlene, are no-nonsense Iowa farmwomen who have been around and have their own stories to tell. They arehard-working people, and I don't want them to think we don't expectanything from the girls. Once, just to show them what I was up against,I showed Cheryl and Marlene the girls' rooms on a "Please Do Not Clean"day.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" I asked, looking over thedebris. It made me feel better when Cheryl and Marlene said, sure, theydid. All the time, in fact.

"The thing is, if they want to live like that . . .," Marleneventured. She had teenagers of her own. "It's their room."

"Slop-a-roos," I said, shutting the doors.

Fern Kupfer is a novelist and writing professor at Iowa State University. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.

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