The Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry

It's Thanksgiving Break and we're so happy here!  We've been to a cello lesson and now we're home, setting up tables and breaking fan belts by vacuuming up necklaces.  A whole troupe of happy homemakers is what we are!  Actually, Tizzy and I may be the only happy ones.  The rest are in thinly disguised agony, which is exactly how I have it planned.  See, I don't do chore lists.  I've never said, "Here's a list of chores, and when it's done, you can play."  I don't know why.

OK, I know why.  It's because I am a control freak.  I don't want the kids to decide how long it will take them to do the chores.  I don't want them to have the option of not doing the chores because they don't care about playing.  I don't want to give consequences;  that's just extra creativity that I don't have.  I've tried that.  "If you don't take out this garbage...oh never mind.  Just take out this garbage!"  Also, I don't want to keep having to remind them about the list.  Plus, a whole list of jobs for a tiny person with the attention span of a pink poodle in a Milk-Bone factory is, well, soul-crushing.

Instead, I take a slightly less soul-crushing approach, which I now realize is the exact approach my mom used when I was a pink poodle in a Milk-Bone factory.  It goes like this:  I wake up on a Saturday morning, wander bleary-eyed into the kitchen and hear noises.  Outside, my mom is in the garage.  Oh, HECK no!  I down some Cheerios and trudge outside because I know it's what's expected of me.  My mom has been seized by some Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry, and she wants to share her zeal.

"Ciiiiirceeeeee!" she chirps.  "Help me move this trunk.  Now, we'll just move it right over here, but first we have to go through these boxes of books and rake up these leaves and put all the tools on this corkboard where I've drawn tool shapes and untangle the Christmas lights and hang this ladder on these ingenious hooks I have just installed and then alphabetize the bikes according to model names, and then we'll just sweep up and then we can go see Aunt Pat!!"

Even if I only heard the part about the sweeping, I know it's bad.  The sweeping part is when I usually have an asthma attack and can't breathe, and nobody notices because the Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry has cast a blinding spell which makes my mother unable to see any affliction, however deadly, that will hamper the completion of our project.  I know not to push the "dying of asthma" thing too far because if I get really serious about dying, I get the Evil Flutter Eye from my mom, which is just a more virulent form of the Evil Eye.

"Can't....breathe..."  I'd fall on the ground clutching my throat and my mom would look down, giving me the briefest Evil Flutter Eye, then step over me, musing, "Hmmm.  We just have to figure out a system for storing the sports equipment."  A minute later, I'd be trying to corral baseballs and basketballs into a big cardboard box that had been labeled with a thick marker, "SPORTS."

My brothers are there, too, all of us silently, miserably carrying out orders, knowing that by the time the job is done, all the good Saturday morning cartoons will be over.  We'll be lucky if we catch the last ten minutes of Fat Albert by the time we have hauled ten bags of old clothes, an outdated Vita-Mix and a broken Big Wheel to the curb.

Later, when the garage is organized and spotless, we do go visit the cousins.  Mom and Aunt Pat lie on the floor "perfecting the art of doing nothing," as they call it, while the cousins compare notes on who had it worse from the Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry that morning.  Pat's kids have likely been silk-screening hundreds of tote bags for their parents' business and rearranging all the furniture in their house, creating a new bedroom out of a storage closet.

So my plan, modeled after my mother's, is to get several good chores out of each kid by cheerfully, aggressively barking out orders, one after another, and if you fall behind, you get more orders, until one by one, each older child begs to be granted a reprieve.  "Yes," I say.  "You can go to Coco's and perfect the art of doing nothing, IF!...you take one little kid with you."

"Yes!  Yes," they cry.  Before too long, the heavy lifting ("We can TOO move this table, now push!") is done, the big chores are complete, and I am left in Pine-Sol-scented solitude to set the tables and garnish the room with Thanksgiving's finishing touches.  Which is what I'm going to do right now...