Of all the tales of lockdown, today I bring you the one that
is perhaps the strangest within the Schwartzberg files: “The Tale of the
13-Year-Old Boy Who Cleaned His Room Without Being Told.”
My oldest son is not what anyone would call a “neat freak.” In fact, he has always seemed to follow the tenets of the Oscar Madison School of Housework; in other words—don’t bother. Letting things fall randomly on the ground—pants, math homework, magazines, three-year-old Halloween candy—seems to be standard practice in the boy’s room. And entering junior high this past year only seems to have increased the gusto with which my son haphazardly tosses crap throughout his lair.
Efforts to have my son clean his room have always met with mixed results. When we tell him to straighten up his room he avoids it for as long as possible before being threatened with loss of screen time. At that point, his “cleaning” basically consists of taking the stuff that was all over the ground and piling it on his desk, shoving it into his closet and hiding it under his comforter. None of the junk ever leaves, it just gets rearranged and within three days it all slowly creeps back out, so his floor is once again a minefield of miscellaneous middle-school mementos, with not an inch of carpet anywhere to be seen. This is how, despite the fact that the room is no more than 100 square feet, one of our cats once got lost in there, as I detailed in a previous blog entry.
So you can imagine my surprise when one morning, about a week ago, I opened my son’s door to wake him and there was nothing on the floor but furniture and nothing on the furniture but things that were supposed to be there like lamps and a few office supplies. My first thought was that we had been burglarized. But what burglar would take off with mismatched dirty socks and incomplete 7th-grade Spanish assignments? Then I thought perhaps I was sleepwalking and this was simply a dream. I pinched myself and said, “Ouch,” and realized I was not dreaming. I wondered if my son even knew his room was clean, so I decided to wake him.
“Hey, dude, wake up,” I whisper-shouted. He replied with a barely audible grunt, opened one eye and looked at me.
“What happened to your room?”
“Huh?”
“Your room. Look at it. What happened here?”
My son propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. At first he looked confused and then memory seemed to return to his groggy mind.
“Oh yeah. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I cleaned it,” he said, laying back down.
“Okay. Well done,” I said, slowly backing out of his room. I didn’t want to make too much of a big deal about it and have him rebel and mess it all up again just to spite me.
As amazed as I was about my son’s middle of the night cleaning escapades, I was more amazed a couple of hours later when he came into the kitchen and grabbed a few trash bags so he could continue to dejunk his already seemingly spotless room. Apparently he had successfully transferred from the Oscar Madison to the Felix Unger School of Housework.
At one point, while my son was lugging a bag of trash down the hallway, I overheard my wife, who was as startled by this turn of events as I, ask him what made him decide to do all this cleaning.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Quarantine makes you do some crazy things.”
Indeed it does. And if this is the kind of thing that happens when my son goes crazy, I’m totally on board with it. Chalk this one up as an unexpected benefit of lockdown.
My oldest son is not what anyone would call a “neat freak.” In fact, he has always seemed to follow the tenets of the Oscar Madison School of Housework; in other words—don’t bother. Letting things fall randomly on the ground—pants, math homework, magazines, three-year-old Halloween candy—seems to be standard practice in the boy’s room. And entering junior high this past year only seems to have increased the gusto with which my son haphazardly tosses crap throughout his lair.
Efforts to have my son clean his room have always met with mixed results. When we tell him to straighten up his room he avoids it for as long as possible before being threatened with loss of screen time. At that point, his “cleaning” basically consists of taking the stuff that was all over the ground and piling it on his desk, shoving it into his closet and hiding it under his comforter. None of the junk ever leaves, it just gets rearranged and within three days it all slowly creeps back out, so his floor is once again a minefield of miscellaneous middle-school mementos, with not an inch of carpet anywhere to be seen. This is how, despite the fact that the room is no more than 100 square feet, one of our cats once got lost in there, as I detailed in a previous blog entry.
So you can imagine my surprise when one morning, about a week ago, I opened my son’s door to wake him and there was nothing on the floor but furniture and nothing on the furniture but things that were supposed to be there like lamps and a few office supplies. My first thought was that we had been burglarized. But what burglar would take off with mismatched dirty socks and incomplete 7th-grade Spanish assignments? Then I thought perhaps I was sleepwalking and this was simply a dream. I pinched myself and said, “Ouch,” and realized I was not dreaming. I wondered if my son even knew his room was clean, so I decided to wake him.
“Hey, dude, wake up,” I whisper-shouted. He replied with a barely audible grunt, opened one eye and looked at me.
“What happened to your room?”
“Huh?”
“Your room. Look at it. What happened here?”
My son propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. At first he looked confused and then memory seemed to return to his groggy mind.
“Oh yeah. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I cleaned it,” he said, laying back down.
“Okay. Well done,” I said, slowly backing out of his room. I didn’t want to make too much of a big deal about it and have him rebel and mess it all up again just to spite me.
As amazed as I was about my son’s middle of the night cleaning escapades, I was more amazed a couple of hours later when he came into the kitchen and grabbed a few trash bags so he could continue to dejunk his already seemingly spotless room. Apparently he had successfully transferred from the Oscar Madison to the Felix Unger School of Housework.
At one point, while my son was lugging a bag of trash down the hallway, I overheard my wife, who was as startled by this turn of events as I, ask him what made him decide to do all this cleaning.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Quarantine makes you do some crazy things.”
Indeed it does. And if this is the kind of thing that happens when my son goes crazy, I’m totally on board with it. Chalk this one up as an unexpected benefit of lockdown.
Completely visible carpet leading up to a bed
