I'll Clean it for You

I'm looking at the mess on my daughter's bedroom floor, and I can hear my mother's voice in my head: Clean this up now, or I'll go in with a trash bag and clean it for you. I generally kept my room clean, partly because I liked it that way and partly because I wasn't sure whether or not it was an empty threat. My mom, after all, would make a spur-of-the-moment threat reality on occasion, no matter how overboard a punishment it might be, so that we knew she was serious. She never changed her mind, and never apologized. I was grounded for two weeks for 'refusing' to eat stew one night, even though I changed my mind as soon as I saw the look on her face.

I was never entirely sure if the threat to clean our bedrooms with a trash bag was true or not, but I didn't worry about it. I was terribly jealous of my younger sister, however, because when her room got to be too bad—for example when the floor pile reached knee height and she needed to jump from the door onto her bed—my mother would clean it. My sister would get home from a slumber party and her floor would be visible. My sister would be wide-eyed for a brief time and then cocky about her special treatment, and I would sulk enviously.

One day my sister was gone and I was passing her bedroom to go somewhere. Our mother was crouched on the bedroom floor with a huge black trash bag and a stretched-to-the-point-of-breaking look on her face. She looked up at me with wide, angry eyes and held up some random toy.

"Does your sister play with this?"

My eyes widened as far as they'd go. My mother was not someone to be trifled with, especially when she was angry, and I didn't want any backlash, no sirree. I looked at the toy, shook my head, pointed out a couple others, and scrammed.

My sister remembers getting home that day. I must have been hiding somewhere, because I don't. Apparently the second she walked into the house she knew something was up. There were both our parents waiting for her with that look on their faces.

"I cleaned your room," our mother said, and my sister's heart skipped. "It will never happen again."

No further explanation was needed. My sister's room was spotless, she didn't know what was missing, and all I'd say was that yes, there was a trash bag involved. I didn't want to get on her bad side for my moment of cooperation, and I didn't want her getting upset about things I hoped she wouldn't miss.

It was months before she went looking for some random thing and couldn't find it. I would neither verify nor negate that it had gone into the trash bag. I'm not even sure how much our mother threw away, because my instincts said hide until they drag you out for dinner.

Back to the present. We've recently moved and my daughter hasn't unpacked anything that I didn't unpack for her. She spent two weeks playing Barbies in her room, and then when the third box of toys arrived from storage, her room got too full to enjoy and she stopped going in except to go to change clothes and sleep. I have two hours before I need to pick her up from school, and a box of black trash bags. Some of the stuff in her boxes has been in storage nearly four years, and chances are she wouldn't miss it.

I guess I'll find out.

A Kid, a Puppy, and a Pointless Story

I was looking over my blog and thought I might go ahead and update you about the dog situation. Quick recap: Excited puppy too much for 11-year-old girl to cope with.

When my sister calmed down, she decided to have a puppy/kid training lesson, and it was a success. The puppy got treats for keeping her paws on the floor instead of jumping, and since it was a specific lesson with specific instructions, my daughter concentrated and obeyed. By the end, she was able to walk across the room without squealing, the puppy was able to follow her without jumping, and she could feed the puppy a treat from her bare hand, though she tended to drop it more often than not.

Another success began with a recent question: How come nobody ever takes me to the movies?

The answer, of course, is: one time, you went to the movies with grandpa and ran out crying during a preview for Coraline. He didn't catch you until you were outside, and you were maybe seven years old. You then began refusing to go into movie theaters.

That's not what I said, though. I said, "Why, do you want to go to the movies?" She did, so we went, and it was a normal movie experience. Since this is all rather anticlimactic, here's a cheese factory story:

One time, at the cheese factory, a coworker told us that he'd heard a completely pointless story once, and it had inspired him to learn to tell completely pointless stories. Here is his story:

He was under the influence of a mind-altering substance and had locked himself out of his apartment. Since he was locked out, he went for a walk. He realized at some point that he wasn't at all sober and he'd wandered into a very bad neighborhood. He was lost and very possibly in danger, so he called the cops on himself. They took him in and locked him up.

An older man there who was very friendly asked him, "Do you like boys, or girls?"

That was pretty much the end of the story. We all looked at each other in confusion. A story like that had to have an ending, didn't it? No, apparently it didn't.

"Well, did you get back into your apartment?"

Yes.

"How?!"

Oh, I'd left the window unlocked. I climbed through.

Mr. Former-Coworker, if you ever read this, thank you. I've told that story so many times, and the looks it gets me are priceless.

DSL - Dog-Specific Legislation

My sister has rottweilers. If you just grimaced or shuddered, feel free to hit the back button, because the dogs are not the problem in this story. The dogs are house pets. One is from a long line of show dogs, and spends most of his time cuddling and asking to be pet. The other is from a line of working dogs, and enjoys fetching things and learning commands. A busy dog is a happy dog, and these dogs are happy.

Puppies do not come trained, this is a sad fact of life. Kids don't come trained, either. When a puppy was introduced to my 11-year-old daughter, there was much drama because puppies nip, and they have no sense of personal boundaries whatsoever. It has been six months now. The puppy is quite a bit bigger and far better trained. She knows things like off, down, toy, bring, and leave it. The kid, however, does not seem to understand this.

My daughter panics every time the puppy comes toward her. The puppy's intentions are greet-and-sniff. My daughter starts turning away to cower against something, squealing, bending and covering her face. Unless something has happened with her father's dog that I don't know about, she's never been hurt by a dog in her life, and yet she acts terrified.

The puppy sees this squealing and body-contorting, and thinks my daughter is initiating play. My daughter won't listen to simple commands, such as Say off, or Ignore her and keep walking, so the puppy bounces or jumps up or yips, and my daughter claims that the dog has attacked her.

Let's pause a moment. The puppy is a rottweiler. What could happen if a melodramatic pre-teen goes to school and tells someone that a rottweiler attacked her? There's a possibility that two pets could be taken from their home and put down, isn't there? Even if neither dog has ever left a mark?

My sister is a certified dog trainer. It drives her crazy that my daughter, after six months of living with my sister and her dogs, still panics. But only over the puppy. The full-grown male rottweiler she's fine with. He can come greet her and she pats his head awkwardly. He tends to move slower in general, but he is no less capable of acting like a dog than the puppy is.

My daughter is afraid of the puppy's potential to hurt her. She's done this with other things, too. For example: she's been afraid of movie theaters since she was about seven because her dad took her to a scary movie once and she doesn't want to get scared.

My daughter doesn't want to listen to instructions because her fear has gotten in the way, and my sister is so upset that she doesn't want to work with the kid. My sister has taken this stubbornness or fear or whatever it is as a personal insult.

I have now ranted myself into either mental exhaustion or a block, which means that I might have been about to really get somewhere. Can't think anymore, though. My sister's crying because my daughter cries every time the puppy comes up, and my daughter is in her bedroom doing whatever 11-year-old girls do in their rooms alone.

So one time, at the cheese factory, they decided to tell a guy he was being fired for a bunch of tardies during his lunch break. Then they sent him back to finish work all emotional and he cut his hand pretty badly with a box knife. The whole line had to be shut down so they could clean everything. They decided after that to maybe start giving people notice on Fridays after their shifts.

Bloody Mary

So, when I was twelve, my parents sent me to summer daycare. Perhaps they were a little overprotective, but details. The point of this blog is that although I was a good kid, I had a mischievous streak, and have always been a skeptic.

When the kids decided that Bloody Mary was living in the girls' restroom, I led a few investigations. There was nothing, of course. There was no blood on any mirror, there was no blue toilet water (because we tested Baby Boy Blue too, while we were at it), and no one came out of anywhere to attack anyone at all.

The whole "good kid" thing is important because I was trying to disprove a theory after little girls started wetting themselves rather than go to the bathroom, since they weren't allowed to use the adult bathroom.

I failed anyway. Kids wanted to believe, for the same reason people like a good ghost story. It's exciting.

There were some girls who claimed they had seen Bloody Mary, and who are you going to believe? A twelve year old, or a group of ten year olds? Well, neither probably, but on with the story.

A group of girls went into the bathroom with a few they were trying to scare, and I volunteered to hold the door open so they could escape when Bloody Mary arrived. So they did their chanting and turning around in circles and flicking water at the mirrors and flushing all the toilets, and when the first girl screamed that the trash can had moved, WHOOMP! The bathroom door sealed closed.

I can't get the door open! *it opens half an inch, then slams shut again* I'm pulling!

I even pretended to pull so the kids outside the bathroom could see that I was innocent. Somehow Bloody Mary had skipped the stabbings and gone straight for holding the door shut, which doesn't sound like much, except that group hysteria is a powerful thing.

During the struggle to open the door and free the girls, someone saw Bloody Mary in a flash on a mirror, someone saw a single drop of blood, someone saw her fly out of the mirror, then disappear, someone saw the trashcan jump, though within three retellings the trashcan had lifted a full foot off the ground and moved across the floor.

I did eventually let go of the door—I mean, I managed to pry it open, against a strong and mysterious force—and a wall of screaming girls fell out and scattered, still squealing, to the winds. Or to five feet away from the bathroom, to relive the terror.

Things kind of faded out after that. I like to think that everyone was so terrified they stopped talking about Bloody Mary, and since no one was talking about it, girls started going to the bathroom again.

That's the end, you can go now. Or go play on Snopes or something, that's always fun.