Chores
Like most kids, we had to do chores. Like most kids, we complained about it and tried to get out of doing them.
One time when it was my turn to wash the dishes after dinner, I just decided I was going to procrastinate and went in to watch TV instead. When I emerged from the family room a couple of hours later, I was delighted to see the kitchen all cleaned up! Someone was an angel and washed dishes for me. Wow, nice things like that don’t happen often in life. I went to my room and got into bed, only to discover that all the dirty pots and pans were in the bed. To be honest, I kind of think I just went to sleep and didn’t even bother moving them. When you’re a kid, you’re little enough to fit in a twin bed with the evening’s pots and pans.
When we were very young, we were required to make our beds in the morning after we got up. That requirement carried on until we were older, too. I don’t ever do it now. I mean, who gives a crap? I remember a time from before I was 5 years old (because of where it happened I can be sure it was before I was 5) when I tried to make my bed and got yelled at for the wrinkles on the covers. As an adult, I look at a 5 year old and know that a kid that age is just not capable of making a bed you can bounce a quarter off of. This was the start (in my memory) of being made aware that nothing I did was ever going to be good enough.
Maybe this is common, but I used to think that my parents had kids just so they could legally have slaves. One time we were made to scrub the kitchen ceiling. We got on chairs and then got up onto the kitchen counter and from there tried to scrub the ceiling. We could only just reach the ceiling from there, so it was difficult to exert enough pressure on the surface to do any good. Needless to say there was lots of yelling done about what a piss-poor job we were doing. Try to do a good job scrubbing something you can only just touch with your fingertips only if you stand on the tips of your toes.
