LAUREN…When I was a teenager, I did a lot more chores around the house than Lizzie does.  It wasn’t like I was getting up at dawn to milk the cows and gather the eggs and chop the kindling — my suburban teen life was pretty cushy — but still, I had my responsibilities.  And I was no angel about this, no eager beaver.  I was a normal recalcitrant teen – which is to say, I was moody, disagreeable  and a pain in the ass, and anything my parents asked me to do was met with exasperated sighs and much eye-rolling.  But dammit, I did my chores.   (Unlike some other teen around here…)

Every morning, I made my bed.  (No comforter that just needed to be fluffed up, like Lizzie has on her bed – which, incidentally, she never ever makes — but rather sheets and a blanket to be smoothed and re-tucked with, yes, hospital corners.)

Every night I set the dinner table.  Easy. Hardly worth mentioning.  On Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights – generally after multiple reminders and thinly veiled threats about the withholding of allowance – I went through the house, room by room, and emptied the wastebaskets into a plastic bag, added the kitchen garbage, deposited everything into the can at the side of the house and then took the can out to the curb.  (Yes, back in those halcyon days of extravagant municipal services, our garbage was collected three times a week.)

My least favorite chore  was raking the lawn after my father mowed it.   I loved the smell of newly mown grass, and I loved being outside.  What I didn’t love was being ordered around by my father who was both a perfectionist and the most impatient man I have ever met – a nasty combo, that. Why he didn’t attach one of those catch-all things to the back, I don’t know.  Probably just to make my life harder.  Yes, that must have been it.

This is not an exhaustive list of my chores.  I also had to put away my clean laundry, keep my room neat, polish the backs of my mother’s copper pots, polish my father’s shoes, and polish the silver whenever my mother though the tarnish had reached unacceptable levels.

Did my parents work me too hard?  Expect too much?  Of course I thought so at the time. Now I’m not so sure.  What I question now is whether I ask too little of Lizzie.

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