Claire took the ACT test on Saturday, which taught me a few of things. One, she's way smarter than I was at the age of 12, two, as old as she's been looking to me lately when you put her in a line of 16-18 year olds she suddenly looks like a baby, and three, a long line of teenagers smells bad. Really, I wanted to get the Febreeze out of my car and spray them all. I was proud that Claire smelled like the Bath & Bodyworks lotion that I'd put in her stocking her for Christmas. I looked around at the greasy, slack-jawed teenagers and thought, "Not only is my kid smarter than all of you, but she smells like flower, while the rest of you would make a dog faint."
I feel that I should explain that I'm not one of those moms who thinks my kid is better than everyone else's. I just think she's better than all teenagers. This will change in five months when she turns thirteen, when suddenly no amount of Bath & Body Works Paris Amour will shield the smell of hormone-filled sweat. In a few months she will walk into the kitchen, and our dog with take a deep breath and faint, and that's just the way the world works.
The other two have a few years left before they become hormone-ridden stinkbags. They certainly have their own quirks, which I am curious to watch unfold with age. Christopher (a smart kid who expresses himself...uniquely) said about our new clear, glass plates, "This is good, Mom."
He held up the plate before he put a Hot Pocket on it.
"Yes, it's always good to use a plate when you're microwaving something that will leak cheese," I said.
"No, I mean the plate," he told me.
"The plate's good?"
"Yeah. It's clear. You can trust a clear plate."
My eyebrows went up. "Can you? How come?"
Michelle, who was sitting at the table listening to the conversation, said, "Because you can tell that it's clean."
"Yeah," Christopher agreed.
"So that makes it trustworthy?" I asked. "This is a plate that you can rely on? You can trust it to show up on time and be true to it's word?"
Christopher frowned at me. "No. That's just weird."
So apparently, there's a limit to this trust. But it's important to Michelle, Claire and Christopher who care about cleanliness. For broads like me and Emma, "clean" is open to interpretation. One spot on a plate does not necessarily make the plate dirty. A few crumbs on a plate that you're going to make a turkey sandwich on? That's not really dirty. Just dust it off. A spot of mustard on a plate that you're making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on? Well, it needs to be wiped off, sure, but is the plate DIRTY? Not really. And how old is the mustard in question? Is it so old that it's hardened? Because if so, then it won't rub off on the pb&j and you can re-use it.
Emma is like I was at her age, and still kind of am. Her room is littered with dirty clothes, scraps of writing, scraps of drawings, cups and (once) a tortilla. Claire stepped on the latter and was horrified.
"MOM!" she cried from the bedroom. "There's a tortilla on the floor with a BITE taken out of it and I stepped on it!"
She said this last part "I stepped on it" as if she'd stepped on lizard guts. Really, I think she was just affronted by the idea of it - that her sister would take one bite out of a tortilla and drop it on the floor like an animal. To make matters worse, the girls share a room now and so Emma not only messed up her own room, she befouled CLAIRE'S. And Claire does not understand how Emma could allow a tortilla to happen on their floor.
But me - I understood. I imagined myself walking into my bedroom, and taking a bite out of a tortilla and then spotting a copy of Yoga Journal on the floor. "That's where that is!" I'd say and sit down to finish reading the article on how to meditate by breathing through my eyelids, and I'd set my tortilla down on the floor next to me, which I would be comfortable with because the floor is relatively "clean." While I'm reading my phone would ring in the next room and I'd fling the magazine across the room to another spot on the floor and rush to answer the phone, which would also be buried underneath several things. A day would go by and I'd walk into the room and spot the tortilla on the floor, and I'd think, "I guess that isn't good anymore. It's probably hard. I'll throw it away later, I think I hear the phone ringing." I would walk past the tortilla every day until it would just become part of the floor and I wouldn't notice it anymore.
I'm not justifying it, I'm just telling you how these things happen. Chaotic messiness is created one ADD-fueled mishap at a time. The phone rings and you fling your magazine across the room, and forget your snack on the floor. And so it begins.
And yes, twenty years ago I would have been the smelliest teenager in that line.
ps- Claire took the ACT early because she scored high in the English section of her Leap test, and she's trying out for the Duke TIPS program. Wish her luck!
