Safety – it runs in the family.

This morning, just before heading home to another state, Jacki and her brood (plus Boris) came for breakfast. Besides feeding them in a way that wouldn’t embarrass me, I had one other singular focus.  I wanted to keep Jacki from seeing the girl’s rooms.  Jacki knows me well – maybe too well, but after she lived through all those slobby college days with me, she turned pro in maintaining a lovely home, raising lovely children and cooking like a gourmet.  I know I am not fooling her, but I still like to pretend.

Before they arrived, we had multiple discussions (read power struggles) regarding the room cleaning.  In the end, we just ran out of time.  The first thing Jacki wants to see?  The girls rooms.  She knows me, and I am sure she wasn’t surprised (lie to me on that one), but Anni made a comment that the girls rooms were REALLY messy. 

Later in the day, I told Andra, in a moment of cruelty, that I was disappointed she didn’t get her room cleaned, and that Anni had noticed.  When she started on the “You are so mean you are destroying my fragile self esteem, I wanted to clean my room 5 minutes before they got here and you told it was too late – so really, I wanted to clean my room but you wouldn’t let me” cry, I relented. I explained that Aunt Jacki had seen my room messy before, so it probably wasn’t such a big deal.  To which she replied, “So I guess I can’t HELP it.  It’s in my genes!”  Followed by a brief explanation to Grace that we are half our mothers and half our fathers, and that she got her dark hair and green eyes from her dad and her slovenly tendencies from me.  She read it in her fluency assignment.

What stinks is that she is probably right.  I would hope she would get my wit, or my strength of character, and not the bad teeth and messy room habit.  When I was a teenage, my mother also groused about my room to which I always replied that it was SAFE.  I could fall anywhere in my room and the accumulated clothing would buffer my fall.  I think I will hold on to that as my legacy.  Safety.  It sure sounds better.
 

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