>An Open Letter to My Family
>Dear Family,
As much as it pains me to write this, it’s time we face facts. I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that my mental capacity far exceeds your own. Once you let that idea sink into your precious-yet-sadly-inferior skulls and come to terms with it, I feel sure your lives will improve, just as mine has.
Because while I used to spend way too much time getting frustrated by certain problematic behaviors in this house, I realized recently that it’s not your fault.
You can’t help, for example, that your nerve cells aren’t capable of sending you the gentle reminder to take your dirty dishes from the table to the sink, rinse them off, and put them in the dishwasher. Now that I’ve perceived the obvious differences in our neuroanatomy, it has become much easier for me to continually move from room to room in order to pick up the food you’ve dropped on the floor and the glasses and empty bottles and plates and cups and bowls you’ve left sitting on staircases, tables, and our mantle. I feel bad now for getting on you about all that. I should have been more understanding. Clearly you were having a hard enough time remembering to breathe and blink your eyes.
With that said, I’m going to try now to be more sympathetic to your collective inability to put your shoes in the shoe basket instead of beside it, the trouble you have putting your dirty clothes in the hamper as opposed to on the floor, and your problems remembering to flush the toilet after going to the bathroom. I now know I was asking far, far too much of you. My heart aches when I think of that time I attempted to show you all how to put toilet paper on the roll. Your neocortical neurons must have been totally overheating, and at the time, I had no idea!
From here on out, I’ll simply smile indulgently as you take yet another clean towel from the linen closet rather than hanging up the ones that cover the bathroom floor. I’ll overlook the contraband food wrappers I find hidden in your bed sheets. I’ll ignore the makeup and food stains that cover every carpet in this house. Not all cerebral cortexes are created equal, and you’ve given me all the proof I need.
We can’t change the past, my beloved dullards, but we can look forward to a brighter, er, happier future together.
All my love,
Lindsay
>Acceptance is the first step to happiness. Now you can go about your vacuuming and washing with a song in your heart and the knowledge that you are simply blessed with higher intelligence. Or you could stash your clean towels in your drawer and let the freeloaders fend for themselves!
>I keep threatning to make everyone do their own laundry. But I can’t stand the thought of them doing it like I did when faced with the same ultimadium- I used t just get lazy and wash everything TOGETHER no matter what it was. My clothes were not well taken care of!
>It must be some sort of epidemic- my family suffers from the same disorder. Maybe we need to start a support group. Now what should we call it?
>My husband won’t put dishes in the dishwasher because he claims he “can’t tell if it’s full of clean or dirty dishes.” Because looking at the plates in there is apparently a mensa level activity.So I started collecting his dirty dishes from around the house and putting them on his side of the bed, because I just wasn’t sure if he was done with them or not.
>How about “Intellectually Advanced Moms are Battling Incredibly Troublesome Child Hebetude,” or I.A.M.A.B.I.T.C.H.? Yeah, that took some time.
>Overflowing brain, that is a BRILLIANT strategy! My poor family can’t put dishes away because they “don’t know where the dishes go.” It’s sad, really. I feel sorry for them.
>I’m in for that support group! I admit, I fit the title quite well. And reading your letter was like reading about my own family, the poor things.
>Maybe during pregnancy we are granted special powers and then with each year our children are on earth our intelligence is enhanced until year 13 in which we go back to “normal” until year 28 where we are back to about year 10 of our children’s lives?Maybe??Love this!
>Thanks!We have passive aggressive wars in this house. Today, I’m winning. Love the acronym.
>Emily, that is a theory only a genius could postulate.
>Too funny! I just read that Madonna is a strict mom. When her daughter leaves her clothes on the floor Madonna PUTS THEM IN A BAG, takes them away, and then makes her EARN them back by being tidy. Or maybe she just sends her stylist out to shop for more. I forget. Personally I think the trick is lowering our standards. Sometimes I wish I never got that LASIK surgery and couldn’t see the mess.
>How funny!!Yesterday I took all of the shoes AROUND the shoe basket (I’m so happy somebody else has one!) and put them in garbage bags. They quickly went through the bag and put the shoes they actually wear back in the basket.I think they all needed a nap after that strenuous activity.
>LOLOL… 😛 I made Jake empty the dishwasher every single day so he knew where the dishes went, and his after dinner chore became loading the dishwasher.Now if I could just get him to put laundry in the hamper….
>Do you live at my house?I admit I’m a terrible housekeeper, but I do try to keep some things under control.My latest kicks – please don’t eat in bed; please don’t eat on the leather couch; please use a plate or a napkin or something instead of just putting the sandwich or whatever you’re eating down on the table (or the arm of the chair) without anything under it; and PLEASE keep up with your damn diet coke and stop leaving half-empty cans sitting all over the house just because you lost the one you were drinking and it was easier to get a fresh one out of the fridge!I don’t have a shoe basket – maybe I should think about that one.
>Well I have to say that when I was a child this was a problem for YEARS… and then one day it all changed.One day my mom decided she had had enough and we were charged 25 cents per offending item… after a couple of months the problem was mostly solved.Of course, I had a couple of incidents when I went into debt and didn’t have any money – and then I had to work off my debt with chores.It wasn’t fun, but it worked!! WHo knows?
>That’s my motto – lower your expectations. Keeps us happy with the dullards 🙂
>Just so you know, I found the perfect threat for laundry. “Either you divide your laundry up and bring it to the laundry room OR, I throw your clothes away. And, we will NOT go on a shopping spree for more. You’ll have to live with what you have.” I’ve only had to threaten it twice, but it works…for my husband. The kid is only one. I figure I should give her a few more months. Hehe. Oh, and you don’t have to throw their clothes away, just tie them up and stick them in the attic or the back of a closet and regift them to them for Christmas.-Ashley (www.bosssanders.com)
>HAHA I really enjoyed this one…if I didn’t know better I would think you lived at my house!!
>Fabulous – linked to this in my blog – looking forward to reading more – found you from “Boobs, Injuries…”
>Hey, can we just change the name on the letter and distribute accordingly? 😉
>*reminder to self*Photocopy and place on the fridge at my house;-)Thanks!
>This is the most beautifully written piece of condescension I have ever read.*wipes a tear*Bravo.
>Wonderful! I’m going to make a copy myself. But, what the hell is a shoe basket?
>When my husband leaves socks on the living room floor, I throw them in his sink. We have separate bathrooms.
>Oh and the dishwasher – we use a magnet. Horizontal for clean, vertical for dirty.
>Overflowing Brain just cracked me up. This is all great.
>I need the kool-aid you’ve been drinking. That letter, word for word, could have been written about my lovely, but apparently mentally challenged, family.
>Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
>I am just like your family, a complete idiot :)I just got married, and our house just kept getting dirtier and dirtier. I finally turned to my husband and said, “I think I’m just now realizing that I lost my little cleaning elf (a.k.a. my mom)!” He said he was wondering who I thought was going to clean up behind me :)I’m showing this letter to my mom… she’d totally relate!
>Haha! You crack me up.
>My oldest son came home one day to find his room stripped of everything and in the trash…he didn’t hide chicken in his dresser after that, or anything else .eewwww kids suck! He’s 41 now, so he can be any kind of pig he wants to be, but I don’t have to look at it. 😀
>Could you pleaes write a letter to my family? Actually, could you just cc THIS letter to MY family? Please?
>Chicken in the dresser, punxxi? Really? Ew.
>I swear, I thought my husband wrote that post. Unfortunately, I’m the one in our household who leaves things all over the place. Pick up the dirty dish, walk towards the sink but then remember something I need in the other room, so I set down the dish in the office, then have to go to the bathroom, and realize I need to pluck my eyebrows, which reminds me I need to make a hair appt. So dear hubby spends the whole day picking up dirty dishes from the top of the printer, staplers from the bathroom, tweezers from the bedside table….and it gets worse as the day goes on. He quietly puts up with me for the most part, but every 3 or 4 days he reminds me, ever so gently, to “PICK UP YOUR SHIT!”
>I would refuse to wash any clothes that are on the floor. Then when they run out of their undergarments…oh well?!
>This is beautiful. I’m totally changing my name to Lindsay and printing this out for my family. I’ll magnet it to the prime real estate on the front of the fridge. Heck, I might even LAMINATE it. You know, so when it gets knocked off to the floor into a puddle of gatorade and kicked under the rug.
>Thank you! Reading this, I now realize my family suffers from the same problem. You just saved me years of grief and frustration.
>I don’t understand how my own father’s favorite rant from my childhood, “You are supposed to be clean when you come out of the shower….therefore the towel is merely wet, not dirty, now hang it up to dry”, fails to work on my own teenage children. And the toilet flushing???? I know for a fact that I totally stressed that fact during their potty training, For the life of me I don’t know why it escapes them now!
>You deserve a Surburban Domestic Nobel Pickin’ Up The Pieces Prize for this magnanimous step on your part 😉
>You are not alone…I may print this letter and tape it to my kids’ doors!
>Reading that letter was a most excellent moment of Zen.
>Are you allowed to nominate yourself for a perfect post? If you can, you should, because this is one of the BEST posts I have read, hands down, in a long time.
>My mother is what I would call a “forward fanatic”. She has a roundtable of friends who love to forward things and love to read forwards. I sent her a copy of your letter because I have a 17 year old sister. I am here to tell you that I believe your letter has been converted to a “Forward” and has been sent out into the ether. Don’t be surprised if it ends up back in your Inbox with a caveat on the end that if you don’t send it on 12 times, you don’t love Jesus.
>I just found dirty dishes stashed in the upstairs hall closet. This is a complex behavior for someone who generally can’t keep his cans of soda from covering the bathroom counter, the nightstand, and half of his desk. Should I run away screaming? Could this really be normal for a 46 yr old man?