My Daughter

I have to rant about my daughter. She is the queen of gross. I don't even know where to start. Since she has been about five, every year at Christmas and in the summer, after her birthday, we would go through all her clothes and toys and do a major cleaning and organizing of her room. Get rid of everything she'd outgrown. Out with the old, in with the new sort of thing. Well, she is now 13. After her last birthday I asked her if we needed to do that, she didn't get a bunch of toys, what she has she's not ready to part with yet, but it hasn't been out in ages. She said we didn't need to do that. I am trying, very hard, to treat her like a teenager instead of like a toddler, so I said ok.

Well, I figured that since she has a ton of new clothes and since every time she has a dress down day at school I send her back to her room to change into something that actually fits, I better get up there and have her go through things with me. I want the clothes that are too small gone so we can not have these fights every time there is a dress down day! So I gave her warning that we were going to do this. I told her to go clean up the mess on the floor.

Oh-and last week we had a conversation about the difference between messy and dirty. I told her she was dirty and it was gross. And I told her that since it is MY house and she's ruining my carpet and making my whole upstairs stink, I do have the right to tell her it's not ok and I do get to decide about those things, even when they are her possessions and it's "her" room.

So I tell her to get all the clothes out of her closet, I don't even want to look in there. All I know is last week she took three bags of trash out of there. Actual trash. Why does a 13 year old have 3 bags of trash in her closet? That was when we had the messy v dirty conversation. She gets the clothes, we go through them. So far, so good.

Then I open one of her dresser drawers, it wasn't awful, we went through it. Next drawer, crammed full of stuff, not folded at all, I am still ok. Then I open the drawer where her socks and underwear are supposed to be. Note I said supposed. There are a few pairs of socks, no underwear at all. Not one pair! Where are this child's underwear!? I don't want to think about it. Also in this drawer are stacks of photos-she has photo albums which are no doubt empty. There is her diary that she is supposed to keep for her counselor, some random papers and about ten candy wrappers. Oh yeah, and a burned out lightbulb. So I have a two year old conversation with her about what we are supposed to do with trash.

Then we get to the nightstand. The nightstand was supposed to be for pajamas and cheerleading/dance/gymnastic stuff and her bathing suits in the summer. She opens the top drawer, it is practically empty, there is one pair of pj pants in there. I just shake my head. Then she tries to open the bottom drawer. It is jammed closed. She gets it open, pulls out all kinds of random clothes, picture frames, and some other crap, I don't even know what.

She moves and when she does it lifts the bedskirt and I see clothes. I then make her pull clothes out from under the bed. There were more clothes shoved under her bed than there were in the closet and three dresser drawers combined. This is when the tirade started. I lit into her about lying to me about putting her clean clothes away. About being dirty and gross. I asked her if her friends did this. She doesn't know. I asked if I should ask them if they do this. No, of course not. Why not? Well, no doubt because they don't and she has to know it's gross and doesn't want her friends to know.

So anyway, she tells me it is clean clothes, that's nice. I already don't fold or put her things away because of this nonsense. The only reason she gets her wash done at all at this point is because I don't want her touching my $1100 washing machine. She breaks everything! In addition to the clean clothes, she pulls out two pairs of pajama bottoms that she had "girl accidents" in. I was just like "you are totally gross". So we threw those out because that's hard enough to wash out anyway, let alone after its been sitting and is all dried in and everything. I told her (again) that when that happens you have to wash it in cold water and put it in the laundry. Maybe this is why she has no panties. May she just threw them all away. I am baffled.

After about an hour I had enough and I assigned her two jobs to finish, one being to match up all the socks she pulled from under her bed and put them away since she says they are clean. Believe me, I don't want to be washing all that stuff-it would be at least two loads of laundry. Then I remembered a large rubbermaid container she has in her room that is for storing stuffed animals in. There are so many stuffed animals on her bed right now that there is barely room for her. And it's a full sized bed. So I went up and said "what's in that box?" Her response, as usually "I don't know". She opened it...clothes. As if you didn't already know that! We'll tackle that tomorrow.

She's a nightmare. From now on she's hanging and folding in the laundry room and I'll watch her put her stuff away. I reminded her that the reason I wasn't doing that was that I was letting her show me she was more responsible and maturing. Yeah, not so much.

I guess that's all for my rant!