Blogs

CAUTION: Rant ahead.

There are days when I just want to throw everything in our apartment away. And I mean everything. But that is not the generation my children are growing me up in.

I have always thought of myself as a good citizen in recycling terms. I've rinsed the bean and tomato residue out of thousands of tin cans and tossed hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles into blue bins.

But that was when it was easy. We lived in a house, and those recycling crates were in the garage, and not only were they picked up on a weekly basis, I didn't have to look at the building terraces of polyethylene and steel on a minute-by-minute basis. Now we are in an apartment, a place that was supposed to be temporary quarters. A place where the recycling truck does not venture. So the recycling we collect is not in the garage, it is in the middle of my kitchen.

Recent conversations have gone something like this: "Mom, why did you just throw out that jar of peanut butter?" Then follows a digging spree, and a rescue of not only the peanut butter jar, but even more evidence of my sins. Enter huge, disappointed sighs as said child emerges with her arms full of plastic and tin (Gee, I thought only mom's were capable of such melodramatic disappointment). Then she brightens. "I know, I can really recycle this big jar and make a marker holder out of it!"

That's terrific. It will sit right beside the cans and jars and egg cartons that have found potential second lives as pencil holders, pen holders, highlighter holders and earring containers. I say "potential" because the completion of these projects takes about as much time as they would otherwise need to biodegrade in a typical landfill. And has my crafty daughter considered what will ultimately happen to the jars and cans she glues and paints when she goes off to college? Should I inform her that they will no longer be fit for proper recycling and will head directly to the landfill and leak even more chemicals into the ground because of her purist artistic and ecological sentiments? Seriously, by throwing them away now, I'm just avoiding the middleman.

There is no point mentioning any of that or the growing mountain in her room, so I shrug and go back to making dinner. I empty a couple cans of diced tomatoes into my pot of onions and garlic, and toss them, unrinsed, into the garbage. That's right. The real garbage.

"Mom! Are you kidding me?" Said child retrieves the cans, rinses them along with her other dumpster-diving finds, and places them so very carefully on the teetering edge of the 150 cans and bottles she has been promising to take to the recycling center for three days. The row of overflowing paper bags is really getting to me, but I remain silent, hoping to make my point. Is there something else I can throw away? I know. A can of green chiles! I head to the pantry, almost tripping over the five brimming bags of recycling. I'm careful, though. There are no winners if those bags fall over.

Because the kitchen is small, I know the sixth bag my do-gooder starts will take a place at our kitchen table, and that's where I must draw the line. Sure, some days a bag of freshly rinsed aluminum has more to say than one of my children. It sits straighter and keeps its elbows off the table, too. But family dinners are an important part of keeping the family cohesive.

In a further attempt at family cohesiveness, I've been summoning what I consider an admirable amount of restraint by not shoveling every single one of those tin cans into a heavy-duty contractor bag and heaving the entire contents into a dumpster. You heard me: a REGULAR dumpster.

The source of my frustration may be a little more complicated than I am letting on, because the fact is, I don't want to stop with the "kitchen" recycling. Perhaps it has something to do with the way my two middle children create the same kinds of piles with ANYTHING, no matter where they are.

It would take a number of contractor bags, of course, but in my "fantasy cleanup," after I finished with the kitchen, I would march directly into the real disaster zones. The bedrooms. And next? The designated teenage mode of transportation, not to be confused with a car, since it looks like something from an episode "Hoarders" on wheels.

Somewhere along the way, my kids became perfectly happy to wade through a thigh-deep mix of used, not-so-used and clean clothes, DVDs, books and actual garbage to get to their beds at night. And, even more to my surprise, it doesn't embarrass them to ride around in a car that looks like a recycling center specifically for plastic bottles on the front passenger seat, and the mountain of donated clothing you'd typically see in the back of a Goodwill warehouse in the back seat.

Just so I'm clear: If I unleashed the contents of my teenagers' rooms and the car they share into the world it would be like sending the Japanese debris field across the Pacific. The world would not be happy and CNN reporters would sit on our doorstep for months as they charted the movement of my childrens' gym shorts to see where they landed and if they would take root. And trust me, with all the hormone-laced residue, they would not only take root, they would grow and support fully independent ecosystems.

So, I know this is just a fantasy, but some days I just want to give up. And throw. Everything. Out. Until a miracle happens. As if she knows where my can of chiles will be laid to rest, said child shakes her head and starts gathering up the five bags of recycling.

I turn back to my pot of onions, garlic, and tomatoes, and open the can of chiles. I don't want to know - and refuse to watch - how she'll manage to cram those bags into the already stuffed car.

That's an entirely different rant.

- Ena Jones

Ena Jones writes middle grade fiction and occasional mom's perspective pieces. She is also a moderator on Verlakay.com, a message board for children's writers and illustrators.