How Baby

As we go into the age where Momo can more or less reliably be asked to clean her room, I’m reminded almost every day of my own mom. Like most parents and children, we had different opinions on what constituted a clean room, an ideological difference I didn’t fully appreciate until I left the nest and suddenly realized what it meant to shoulder the burden of keeping an entire house clean, like she did.

We had a check that went a little something like this: she’d ask me if I cleaned my room, I would say yes, and she would ask me if it was mommy clean. Invariably, it wasn’t. It’s proving remarkably useful on her granddaughter, who’s definitely trending more to my side in that a room is clean if you can see the floor. But, somehow, Momo hasn’t noticed I’m a bit of a slob, so it still works.