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By Mary Oves

I stared in horror.

“What did you do?”

I had just arrived home from errands to what looked like a culinary bludgeoning. A sink filled with pots and pans, dishes covered in cement-hardened egg vomit, and coffee mugs filled with solidified gray-flecked bacon grease. Toast crumbs flecked the counters, butter splotched the surfaces, and bacon grease spittles covered the stovetop grates, the hood, the microwave and the backsplash.

Signs of struggle were apparent, the kitchen looking like the remnants of an epic global battle between the Breakfast Transformers, Optimus Pork and Megatoast.

I turned to face my son.

“I was only gone a few hours. The kitchen was spotless when I left. What in the world did you do?”

My middle son stood a safe distance away, arms crossed, his face registering an expression with which I was intimately familiar and which communicated the following:

I’m not sure what she wants to hear at this point. Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure what I did wrong. I mean, she has always told me I am a wonderful boy. What is she so angry about? Is it really as bad as she is making it out to be? Am I still cute enough to get away with whatever she thinks I have done? How do I convince her that my nutrition is far more important than the cleanliness of the kitchen? How do I impress upon her that instead of ire, she should feel pride that I made my own breakfast? Isn’t that the important thing when you love your children? To feel pride in their accomplishments? I mean, no one was hurt in the making of my breakfast sandwiches, and mom has always said that as long as no one gets hurt, anything else can be fixed. And what brand of humor would alleviate this charged situation? Dry? Acerbic? Low-brow? High-brow? Must decide now…

He did not choose humor at all, surprisingly enough. He chose, instead, to show me a video.

“Ok,” he said, making his way slowly towards me, “I know it looks bad. But look at these.”

He thrust his phone out to me, and I glanced down to watch a video of his four gargantuan, overstuffed breakfast sandwiches laid out attractively on a plate. The background music of the video was a celebratory E major, the most royal and dignified of all the musical keys. And of course, the video ended with a quick flash to his self-satisfied face, as he prepared to gorge on his culinary triumph.

I watched it twice.

“So?”

He looked aghast. “What do you mean, so? These sandwiches took an hour to make. I used a dozen eggs, a half-pound of bacon, a quarter pound of cheese, and four English muffins. I mean, I cleaned out the entire refrigerator for these bad boys. I used the groceries in the house, isn’t that what you always ask us to do?”

He had me there.

“Fine, your sandwiches are impressive, and I’m glad you cooked at home. But that’s not the point.”

He had the temerity to look perplexed, wondering what angle he didn’t cover.

“So what’s the point?”

“The kitchen. The kitchen is the point. When you cook and use dishes, you’re supposed to clean up your mess. You’re 22 years old. I mean, look around you.”

He glanced around as if he were seeing it with fresh eyes.

“Whoa. This kitchen is trashed.” He gave a little laugh.

“It certainly is. What should we do about it?”

“Well, Mother, would it be satisfactory at this point for me to ask you to handle it? I am a working man now, and I have deadlines to meet, as you can well imagine.” He nodded in the direction of his remote home office set up in the middle of my living room.

This was the wrong move, and he knew it immediately. Mention of his remote “home office” is my sore spot.  I don’t even have a home office yet. And despite the fact that it is only temporarily remote until he gets shipped off to his company, every time he saunters towards his expensive leather chair and announces, “I’ll be in my office if you need me,” my diastolic skyrockets.

“Would it be satisfactory? No, it would be not be satisfactory. It would be highly unsatisfactory. I am not your maid. You know the rules.”

He looked at me patiently and condescendingly, and began speaking in a tone most effectively used when talking to a small child or a frightened animal.

“Now, Mother, of course I am aware that you are not my maid. It’s silly of you to suggest otherwise. But I suppose what I’m asking for at this point is maybe a little bit of…compromise, shall we say? Some flexibility? Maybe you can meet me halfway? I have a conference call coming in at, oh….,” he glances down at an imaginary watch on his wrist, “well, in 10 minutes. Now you and I both know I can’t possibly do this kitchen justice in only ten minutes. And while I apologize for the inconvenience, for now you must please excuse me.”

And off he went with that maddening saunter to his home office.

(Where in the world did he learn to talk like a stuffy overbearing English linguistics professor? Oh, right.)

There are certain things I simply cannot control with three men in the house, not if I want a semblance of a life. Maybe if I gave up recreation, work, sleep and religion, I could run a perfectly clean orderly household. But since I am not willing to do that, I must simply do the best I can with the following:

Drinking glasses. The following are the only sad derelict specimens I have left in my cabinet right now as far as drinking glasses, because the boys have broken every single nice glass I have ever purchased. I have: a single mysterious errant stemless red wine glass (left on my counter from a party they threw while I was in Canada), a plastic Pepsi tumbler, a Mason jar, a Life is Good water glass, a Pilsner glass, a lidded Goji berry juice jar, a Christmas punch glass with handle and a rose-gold rimmed white wine flask with metal straw. The Cabinet of Misfit Glasses. I have some sturdy Crate and Barrel drinking glasses arriving soon. Let’s see how long they last.

Coats. Patagonia jackets. Carhartt coats. Fleece hoodies. Snowboard jackets. Sweatshirts. Flannels. Golf windbreakers. Foul weather gear. Times three boys. Do the math. I cannot find a coat rack that has enough arms, and even when I do, the weight of the coats eventually topples the rack no matter how well the weight is distributed. Normal people would step back and think, “Hey, maybe I should put some coats away.” Not my boys. When the arms are all taken, they start throwing one coat on top of the other at the top of the rack. At night the lamps in the foyer light the coat rack in such a way that it takes on the shape of a large hulking ominous creature. I leave it there, hoping it discourages intruders

Shoes. Work shoes, work boots, snowboard boots, workout sneakers, work sneakers, dress sneakers, slip-ons, Uggs, moccasins, Rainbow flips, boat shoes, times three boys, ad nauseum. Since I can’t spend my life monitoring their comings and goings, and I have never been able to find a big enough receptacle for all of their shoes, the bulk of their footwear ends up on my foyer floor. My fantasy is to have a big hole into which I can just toss their shoes. The hole would ultimately lead to the crawl space into which they would have to crawl with the spiders and small dead rodents to retrieve their shoes.

Fruit. I buy it. No one eats it. Excluding bananas and grapes, I’ve never seen any one of my boys ever eat a hand fruit in their entire lives. Hand fruit takes entirely too much energy for them. Citrus fruits have to be peeled, they’re sticky, and there’s no guarantee that they will taste good. Apples are juicy, and then the juice gets on their precious hands. Pears have to be the perfect combination between ripeness and crispness, and who the hell knows when that is? Nectarines are universally pleasing, but hard to find, you know, buried deep in that refrigerator crisper. My boys like their fruit cut into pleasing little shapes, placed into attractive bowls, and hand delivered to them like when they were little boys cuddled in blankets on the couch while watching “Blues Clues.” Those days are long over. But sometimes, for kicks, they feign sickness or exhaustion so as to get personally hand-delivered, hand-cut fruit.

Backpacks. This is a new addition as of three minutes ago when I tripped on two heavy backpacks. You say your kid has one backpack that he places neatly by the door? Lucky you. My boys each have three at the minimum: one they use for academics, one they use for sports and one they use to sneak illegal contraband past parents, concert attendants and sporting referees. This last is a very scary backpack. I used to look in them when they were younger, being the parent and all, and I saw things no mother should ever have to see. I don’t look in those backpacks anymore.

They are shameless. Or I’m a fool. Probably both.

— Mary Oves

Mary Oves lives at the Jersey shore with her three sons: twins John and Dustin, 22, and Tommy, 18. Oves is a widow of four years and a professor of English at the local college. She devotes all of her spare time to travel and working on her blog, the-not-it-girl.com.