Maternal Guilt: Of Bras, Underwear--Stay With Me Now--Teenagers' Rooms, Rescue Workers, And Microwaves

Remember when your mother used to admonish you about wearing clean underwear or making sure your bra had no safety pins by presenting to you the scenario "What if you were rushed to the Emergency Room! All the doctors and nurses would see that!"? My sister Patti and I would roll our eyes and stomp upstairs muttering about how stupid Mom was, and later in life we'd reminisce and talk about maternal guilt and confess that we'd say the same thing to our own kids. (Well, she'd say the bra thing to her three daughters; I had two boys and could employ the clean underwear line on a fairly regular basis.)

As Jared and Sam became teenagers, I found that I could improvise upon my mother's basic salvo and apply it to their lair upstairs. Sad to say, my sons were no different than any other teen boys: the room they shared was a disaster all of the time. Dressers were unused because the floor was much easier. The cordless phone was located only by calling it from the cell phone and using an advanced system of echolocation. At one point, Rick forbade me from even going upstairs because I became a madwoman unleashed. "What if something happened and emergency services had to break into this house for some reason? Firemen or rescue people would come up here and see all of this! What would people think!? The headlines would read: LOCAL TEACHER'S HOME A MESS--HEALTH DEPARTMENT SUMMONED!" I'd yell.

Truth is, the only person who any of that works on is the mom. I truly believe that my mother's only objection to our safety-pinned bras was that someone else might see them. And, if my boys wanted to wallow in squalor of their own making and I didn't have to see it, well, then, okay, but I didn't want to have to take the fall for it. Know what I mean?

And here's what made me wax philosophical about all of this.

Cleaning my microwave.

Seriously.

Cleaning my microwave.

First of all, I have no freaking idea how my microwave gets so crappy. I cover every darn thing I put in there, I don't cook in there, and no one is around here to use it but Rick and me. And Rick does not use it. I have major issues with a dirty, grungy microwave, but as you know, it is a bitch to clean because you can't just fire up the old Mr. Clean and go to it. (No, you can't! You can't use a chemical in a microwave and transfer all those polymers and carcinogens to your food! Ugh!)

But I digress.

So, I started getting really complacent, and then when I put in some meat to thaw, I saw it. Oh my God, I thought, What if someone comes over and sees this? They'll think I'm a pig. I got the old Pyrex measuring cup out, and steamed that baby up. Totally clean now.

Sadly, I feel so much better. So! If there is some sort of emergency--heaven forbid--at the Dept. and rescue personnel are involved, they damn well better look inside my microwave!