Louisa Simmonds

bringing my towel along (Photo credit: hufse)

So the adjustment to apartment-living might have been a little more painful than I envisaged, although it’s not necessarily the reduced square metreage that is affecting my usually joyful disposition, but having teenagers 24/7 in my face.

My timing has never been great. NC is still on uni break and Kurt went back to school today for a mere three hours of minimal pain relief.

Meanwhile I have been trying to work, appease clients, and sort through all of the shit I missed last week – difficult with Foxtel blaring through my eardrums at a forbidden level-twenty-eight on the volume button, and although my clients may well be interested in who is shagging who in Primevel, it just doesn’t sound professional as background noise.

I guess it must be hard for the teens to crunch their way through a 2kg box of cereal and a crusty loaf of bread and listen to the tv at the same time, poor lambs.

Added to which, one of the usual teenage dossers showed up at Dysfunctional Hostel last night looking for board and lodging. He ate all of my food shop in one sitting, slept on the sofa (which required more clean sheets to add to the dirty laundry pile of ski-wear) and then fucked off out the minute the dishwasher needed unloading. I know he takes advantage of the fact that I have a soft spot for him.

Bitter much?

I’m not sure what I resent most about the seemingly impossible task of house-training my particular brand of teenager – the fact that they have no short-term memory when it comes to domestic rules and chores and yet can remember the start time of every mindless show on Foxtel; their ability to live comfortably in their own filth without catching some horrible, terminal disease that might teach them a lesson or the fact that they can eat their way through my week’s food shop in one night without putting on an ounce of weight.

Call me bitterly and dangerously psychotic but these are the unforgiveable teenage behaviours that are getting my vagina in a very dangerous twist at the moment, as if effects of peri-menopause weren’t bad enough.

Breakfast of Champions? Courtesy of James at http://www.flickr.com

I had a nightmare about the half-finished, discarded bowls of cereal that are permanently putrefying in my sink and the wet towels last night.

I could write a thesis about wet towels. If the tv programme Mastermind still existed, wet towels would be my specialist subject; although the kids say that I’d be just as knowledgable on ‘nagging’ in the general category.

Then there are the fruit stickers I find stuck to my beautiful painted coffee table and the warm milk that is never returned to the fridge…

I could go on and on but then that would mean that I am letting it get to me.

How do I house-train my teenagers without them hating me?

#domesticity #Family #livingwithteenagers #Humor #teenagers