Weekday Empty-Nesters, Weekend Indentured Servants

It is demoralizing to realize that after years of being a diaper-changer, short-order cook, laundromat, car-pooler and all out factotum, you have graduated to being a motel, a Maytag, a bank and a drive-through fast-food joint.


I mention the word ‘graduated’, but it is not necessarily a sign of progress.


While they were in college, the kids would breeze in for the weekend with empty stomachs, empty wallets and full hampers, and then out the revolving door with refills and a clean load. They slept through until lunchtime, borrowed the car, hit a few bars, and with whatever left-over time they had, walked around with the cell phone glued to their ears. I guess we shouldn’t complain. They did, in all fairness, spend the remaining five minutes giving us updates (and requests), even if they were punctuated several times with the ‘ching’ of a received text message.


During this time, my best dreams were when I would snatch the cell phone from them in the throes of a tantrum and throw it in the pool. My worst nightmares were when I had to run to TMobile to pay for new ones.


My son had much the same ‘treating the house as a hotel’ routine as my daughter, except he would hit the gym to perfect his six-pack, and then come home to watch basketball in front of the TV, with another kind of six-pack.


Someone once asked my friend’s son, who was studying at UCLA, how he did his laundry. His answer was “I take the 405 South”.

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On her way out the door one evening, my daughter handed me a sweater with: “This needs to be hand-washed”, leaving behind a trail of perfume and an indignant, open-mouthed mother. The open mouth was actually poised and ready for the inquisition: Are you going out like that? Where are you going? What time are you coming back? Who are you going with? Is anyone a designated driver? Are you going to drink? This last one is like asking Hannibal Lechter: Are you going to eat that? (No, to the liver and the fava beans and yes to the Chianti).


Too late. She hopped into the waiting car and before I could check to see the fellow revelers, it zoomed off in a cloud of giggles and high spirits, leaving behind the smell of rubber and exhaust. And a really pissed-off mother.


I threw the sweater peevishly into the hamper. Carrie Bradshaw said it right in an episode in ‘Sex and the City’: “Living at home is great. It’s like having servants for free”.


An hour later, I was digging through the hamper to retrieve the sweater, still muttering under my breath… then I sulked as I made her bed, griped as I wrote the check to her landlord, kvetched as I picked up clothes off the floor and carped as I cooked and filled plastic dabbas with food for her to take back to her apartment.

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A word about those dabbas. A gora friend was a bit stymied upon espying stacks of empty yogurt containers in my cupboard, and debating to herself whether I was going to put them up on eBay or planning to go down in the Guiness Book. Probably another weird Indian custom, like collecting those packets of Taco Bell hot sauces and McDonald’s napkins. I explained how I cook up a storm with every visit and fill up Tupperware boxes of food to send back with the kids…which they never return. No amount of threats (or promises?) not to cook ever again can get them to bring them back. So we resort to washing and reusing ricotta cheese containers, restaurant doggie-bag boxes, Ragu sauce bottles etc.


I am willing to bet you ten of my dabbas that the boxes are stacked in the back of their fridge, still full of food, now rendered unidentifiable, fungied and probably fossilized.


Glossary: dabba – box

gora – white, Caucasian