Borrowing Clothes

We ("we" meaning me) live with a great many non-normal people. If you met them you would agree that they are not normal. Well maybe if you were driving by and saw them in the yard, you would look at them through your car window and think that they look normal, but if you had to spend an hour with them raking leaves or mowing you would realize that they are not normal.

They do things like chase the dogs with the lawn mower. It is not fair to the three legged dog that they still continue to chase him with the mower, but they do.

They are non-normal. We alone are the only normal person that lives here.

We noticed that our children grew bigger as time went on. No matter how hard we wished that it wouldn't happen, it happened anyway. After our children got to be about 9 years old they started resembling people. It was about this time that they stopped wearing diapers. A few years later they started school. At about 15 years of age they began to look like they might someday actually resemble adults.

When they get to be about this age you might expect them to wash their clothes, fold their clothes and put them in a dresser, or hang their clothes on a hanger in the closet. We have news for you, this is not going to happen. Instead they are going to take off their dirty clothes and throw them on the floor. They will lay there for days or weeks or months as they walk around or over them. They will be blind to dirty clothes on the floor. They will live in their rooms as if nothing were the matter.

The dogs will stop going in the room, except maybe to pee. When they need clean clothes ("need" means that everything on the floor has mold growing on it, or has the smell of dog piss or has some similar ailment) they are going to wait until you are not around and get your clothes out of your closet. You will come home from work and say to your child over a micro-waved dinner of macaroni and cheese, "Nice shirt, I have one just like it."

They may say, "Yeah, this shirt is yours." More likely they will just grunt something that either means they acknowledge that you are alive or that you just spoke.

Your clothes are going to disappear, evaporate. You won't find them again. And if you do find them and even if you can get them clean you won't have the gumption to wear them because you will wonder if the dog peed on them and where.

We have gone to the dresser to get underwear for the day only to find that part of the drawer is completely empty. No shorts. As you go through the day without shorts you wonder why you really need them at all anyway. There must be some reason or they would not have been invented and everyone would not be wearing them. It is still a mystery.

So you will have to begin to hide your clothes. You will need your own clothes stashes. You will need to hide both the dirty and the clean clothes. The others will then start asking you indirect questions about where your clothes might be hidden and they will be searching your room, looking under the bed when you come home.

You will need to get the clothes out of the dryer as soon as it stops running. They will be safe in the washer as no one ever moves clothes to the dryer except the adult units in the dwelling.

When our kids move out we are thinking of burning down the house and starting over.