Mom On Strike
Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Is it really possible to get
teens to clean up? One woman takes a stand and gets more than she bargained for…
The dirty socks, by
themselves, were not the thing that drove Karen McLauchlan over the edge.
Nor was it the junk food
wrappers and ponytail elastics strewn about the floor, the swiftly mounting
piles of laundry or the duty of placing a green vegetable on the table each
night.
No, what drove her nuts was
that no one even noticed how hard she worked. As far as her husband and three
daughters knew, Harry Potter waved a magic wand over their dirty laundry and
returned it, cleaned and folded, to their dresser drawers.
And in asking, and asking,
and asking her offspring to pick up the occasional dirty plate, she found
herself turning into a creature she never wanted to become - The Nag.
"I was like, this is
going to change, and I'm going to change it," McLauchlan says.
That's when she launched the
bombshell. She was going on strike.
Just so nobody would miss
this dramatic development, she announced it to the world in a letter to the
editor of a newspaper. For the entire month of January, she wrote, she would no
longer clean up after, coddle or cook restaurant-quality meals for her family.
They were on their own.
This should be the point
where she slams the door and storms out of the house. But no. She had a
delusional, utopian idea her family would actually pick up the slack.
So she dubbed it
Responsibility Month, and envisioned her brood cheerfully pitching in with
chores to make the household run smoothly.
"This isn't a
punishment," she says. "I want them to learn how to do things for
themselves."
On the other hand, this
former attorney and artist savored the thought she might actually get some time
to herself.
"You have a lot more
time when you're not spending every five minutes picking up after
somebody," she says.
'Our mom's quitting'
On a Thursday afternoon a
few days after Responsibility Month started, McLauchlan is rehashing it with
Lauren, 15, Lindsey, 13, and Cory, 11.
They're sitting at the table
in a spotless kitchen in their sparkling, modern Geneva home. Cory has done her
part for domestic bliss by making blond brownies, which sit enticingly on a
platter.
The talk turns to all the
fan mail Karen got from moms after the newspaper published her "on
strike" letter. But the daughters aren't cheering.
"At first I was kind of
angry because of the way she put it," says Lauren. "We thought, 'Our
mom's quitting.' But then she explained. She said, 'I want help. I don't like
yelling at you guys.'"
Lindsey didn't know about
the letter in the paper until her friends' moms read it. One of them consoled
her with, "You can come to dinner at our house if you don't have
food."
'Ick, it's so boring'
Despite such drama, Karen
persisted in going on strike. She told the girls they could operate on an
"every man for himself" basis in terms of laundry and food, or they
could cooperate to get chores done. They chose to cooperate.
"So each one has a
cooking night," she explains. "I drop them at the grocery store, give
them money and they buy the ingredients."
The girls keep track of
whose night it is to make dinner on a chart. They also take turns washing
dishes and doing laundry.
"The worst thing is
grocery shopping," says Lindsey. "It was hard to find stuff. We just
went up and down every single aisle. We know where the milk is, but where do
you find something like french-fried onions in a can?"
Lauren looks at the bigger
picture. "It gives you an appreciation for what your parents do," she
says. "Like, if you left milk out on the counter, if your mom didn't put
it back, it'd still be there."
Lindsey isn't done
complaining, though. "I don't like washing pots," she says.
"And, you can't just put clothes in the washer and go to a movie. You have
to stay and dry them and fold them, and it's boring."
"Many hands make light
work," Karen responds cheerfully.
It's starting to dawn on
Lauren, the oldest, that she will actually need to know this stuff someday.
"I think about college sometimes," she says. "And I'd like to be
a mom." She thinks a moment and adds, "Eventually when I have kids,
they'll have to do laundry and cook."
Moms are strange
Karen decides it's time to
check the progress of the basement rec room, where the girls have let some mess
pile up. She leads the way past an immaculate living room, which is adorned
with some of the artistic metal crafts she made and sold when she ran her own
company. She also made stained glass and jewelry.
After descending the stairs
to the basement, everyone has to step over dirty laundry and pick their way
around candy wrappers, empty pop bottles and pieces of games and toys.
This room had been the flash
point for Karen's whole idea to go on strike. When she asked her husband
Charlie to make the girls pick up all that detritus, he responded, "You
make them pick up to your standards."
For Karen, that was the
comment that broke the camel's back.
"It said
everything," she later wrote in her strike declaration. "These are
not OUR household rules, not issues to teach OUR children ... but MY standards,
MY issues (unreasonable, of course) and MY problem to enforce same."
Armed with that anger, she
decided to go on strike.
Now, many days later, she
moves on to a bicycle, explaining Charlie received for Christmas a stand that
converts a regular bike into an indoor exercise bike. Then she bends over to
pick up some clumps off the ivory-colored carpet.
"But do you think he'd
take the mud off the bike before he brought it in from the garage?" she
asks. "I think only moms notice when big chunks of dirt fall on the floor.
We moms are strange that way."
Right brain, left brain
Once safely back upstairs,
Lauren takes out a pot to boil water for pasta, and starts to slice zucchini.
Karen says that she retired
from lawyering, but still occasionally uses some of her legal skills for the
company she and Charlie own. The company employs computer controls to run the
heating and cooling systems of large buildings.
"Early on, we discussed
what we were going to do, and we felt one of us needed to be the primary
caregiver for the kids," said Charlie in a later phone interview. Because
of where they were in their careers, it made more sense for Karen to stay home,
he added.
But Charlie, who often works
upward of 12 hours a day, realizes she has many talents beyond domestic ones.
"She's one of those
rare people who have both right and left brain skills. She graduated from
Northwestern University Law School summa cum laude, but at the same time she's
a highly accomplished artist," he says. And he wonders whether she's
getting enough fulfillment at home.
"I do think that's
missing for her," he says. "Prior to this experience, there were
times where she'd expressed frustration about things around the house. My
response was, 'Maybe you'd be happier not being a full-time mom.' I wouldn't be
opposed to her pursuing her law career, even part time. But she insisted she
was happy.
"I wonder if other
things would bring her fulfillment. I'm not sure she's recognized that,"
he says.
Karen does have one
volunteer project she's working on, though. She has become president of the
Fisher Farm Master Association, which is like a homeowners association but
larger. She's tackling issues such as retention ponds for the 700-home
association.
A month later
We checked back in with the
McLauchlans at the end of Responsibility Month to see whether the dirty dishes
had piled up to the ceiling.
Nope. Some dirty dishes sat
near the sink and the basement still had some disorder, but otherwise, the
house would pass muster with Mr. Clean.
"I'm pronouncing
Responsibility Month a great success," Karen says. The girls kept up their
rotations of cooking, laundry and dishwashing without fail - even through
Lauren's final exams at school.
Neither laundry nor grocery
shopping got any easier for Lindsey. She still found them annoying, but she did
them.
"The good part was that
my mom didn't yell at me," she says. "And now I can make noodles and
chicken."
Cory did find that her
chores got easier, though. "I'm helping with stuff more," she says.
Charlie found that he had
really come around.
"We weren't eating as
well, " he says, laughing. "We were having, like, macaroni and cheese
instead of - well, Karen's a more accomplished cook. But I did enjoy seeing how
the girls took responsibility."
Now that Responsibility
Month is over, what happens next is somewhat fluid. Karen will no longer be on
strike, but she wants each girl to cook at least one night a week.
Next, the world
When asked whether being a
mom on strike felt more like being a freedom fighter or a crusader for the
rights of the downtrodden, Karen's curious intellect takes off. She says her
role models are authors Desmond Morris and Jared Diamond, whose books about
human and societal evolution led her to write an essay called, "If Women
Ran the World."
Writing essays in her time
off from laundry duty? Maybe she did have an intellectual itch that needed
scratching.
Now that intellect is going
to get an audience. A day after we checked in on the family's progress, Karen
e-mails to relay some news.
"I joined the blogging
world. I'm at a blog site called Dark Bilious Vapors," she wrote. The
site, which she shares with a former law school alum, is at
http://www.cleavelin.net/
OK, there's definitely
something going on here. Mom goes on strike, gets demands met, becomes blogger
in spare time.
"Maybe it's part of a
natural evolution where Karen's freeing up time for these other outlets,"
Charlie speculates.
After 15 years of being Mom,
who could blame her?