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My adopted stepson, like most teenagers, and lets face it most people in general, is not an avid fan of cleaning. When he was younger asking him to clean his room was synonymous with ‘could you please shove everything that is on the floor underneath the bed and into the bottom of the closet?” While he was made improvements over the years when it comes to shoving items underneath his bed, a large portion of that can be attributed to the fact that we broke down several years ago and bought him a loft bed, making hiding everything on the floor underneath the bed impossible. The closet however, still remains fair game unless you specifically remember to inspect it upon completion of the room cleaning.
His brain always hungry for knowledge, my adopted stepson is a devoted reader, so much so that he has more books than can fit into his room. We have a box on the floor of the closet of our spare room for him to put all of the books that do not fit into his bedroom. With his cleaning style we know that is most likely where the books would end up anyway, so at least this way everyone is happy, well when the books actually make it into said box that it.
The books actually tend to reside on the floor of the spare room, affectionately known as ‘the yellow room’ due to the bright canary yellow paint that the previous owners of the house adorned the walls with. Astonished with how well the room had been picked up the last time he was told to go into the yellow room and pick up all of his books that were on the floor (which was just about the entire contents of the box) no one checked the closet. Basking in our glory that our lessons had finally breached the thick walls of his “I don’t want to clean it right the first time” mindset both my husband and myself patted him on the back for the clean floor and went about our merry way, it was only yesterday that I discovered that the books were not in the closet where the should be, but each and everyone of them, along with miscellaneous school work from last year, were shoved underneath the bed.
After speaking to him briefly about the books, expecting some push back from him, since his friend was still over and he was in the middle of playing a video game, instead he jumped right on it. Not only did he put his books away, he went through the school binders and folders that were in there, and once that room had been completed, he actually went into his own bedroom and packed that up as well before coming downstairs to tell me that he had finished and that he was sorry for shoving everything underneath the bed.
I stood there in complete awe for a moment, while my brain tried its best to wrap around the concept of him voluntarily cleaning up his room. It used to be that we could expect a day of moodiness, not so pleasant looks, and some fairly good stomping for such an infraction as not only having him pick up after himself, but having him do it while he was already in the middle of something so important as video games! I thanked him for doing a great job, and this time purposely didn’t venture upstairs to see what, if anything had been shoved into his own closet, or even left on the floor of the yellow room. The effort that he put forth, as well as the sincere apology was good enough for me. After watching him give up before he started at just about everything for so many years, seeing him put some honest effort into an unpleasant task was pretty darn cool. Instead of attitude, I got more cleaned than I asked for, and a son who actually felt bad for not doing the right thing the first time around.
Jokingly, after we spoke about how responsible he was becoming, I gave him a look and questioned, “Okay, so who are you, and just what have you done with my son?” Without missing a beat he turned his head just before disappearing back up the steps to play video games with his friend and wryly replied “Don’t worry, you’ll get him back soon enough!” Oh Lord, he’s picked up on our sarcasm; we are all in trouble now!
