Mommy won't always be like this
I promise I will get back to a regular, healthy, bran-filled schedule of posting in just a few weeks. Right now I'm trying to pack up all my possessions to move them to the new apartment next week, since that's when we could get the U-Haul and all the free-ish labor. (Coolboy says it'll cost me pizza. And to that I say, "Whatever, Schnell!" Except I probably will order pizza because I'm awesome like that. Also I will need some too.)
The tragic part is that my precious comfy bed with its Egyptian cotton sheets of I'm-better-at-sleeping-than-you-ness will be moving into the new place before I will. Cannot overstate the sadness of this.
It has also struck me that my roommate years are just about over. On the one hand, it's a relief to think that after 11 years and 42+ roommates I can be done with the Living with Other Women thing. On the other hand, I will now have to start living with a BOY, which means I can never blindly use the bathroom in the middle of the night ever again.
Things I will not miss about female roommates:
Eating disorder girls who eat all your food and THEN just send it to the toilet.
Overhearing clandestine phone-sex calls placed to boys out on missions.
Walking in on making-out couples.
Getting walked in on whilst making out.
Dealing with entire gerbils of shower drain hair.
Women who brush their hair over the bathroom sink. I will never know what that's about.
Finding boys no-longer-asleep on my couch in the morning when I wander downstairs in my underwear to grab my laundry.
Coordinating menstrual cycles.
The White Erase Board.
The thermostat wars.
Kim Anderson, Anne Geddes, and those wooden plaques with "Live well, love much, laugh often" painted on them.
Never having any freezer space because freezers were not meant for 6 separate people to be using them at once.
Copies of First Knight, The Lake House, and romantic comedies starring Jennifer Lopez located where people can actually see them and maybe think that they're MINE.
Wondering what in the WORLD these women are doing to be running out of toilet paper so fast. I swear some of them must have been using it instead of bath towels after their showers.
You get the idea. On the other hand, there are really nice things about living with girls:
It's pretty much impossible to ever be completely out of tampons.
A group of girls are both cleaner and sweeter-smelling than a group of boys.
Girls will let you borrow clothes before a big date. Not only do I not see GF lending me clothes, but he'd probably be all put out that I was going on a date in the first place.
Someone always has a brownie mix.
Now, let's hear yours!
I'm Steph, a librarian and mom of 3 (not sure how that happened). Let's chat books, food, Sumptuous Literary Adaptations, poop, knitting and maybe some crazy Mormon Feminism.
28 comments:
You know . . . you don't really have to not not miss those things. For all you know, in as few as fifteen years, you could be experiencing them again.
Except that you'll actually get to punish them with your withering glare this time around.
No more bill splitting!
If someone leaves a mess and it wasn't you, you know who it was. No one can duck and evade.
PRO: Having movies around that I didn't own and had never seen.
CON: People putting up completely crappy posters like a freaky old Willy Wonka one right on the landing of the dark staircase where you wanted to have a heart attack any time you came up in the evening.
PRO: Being able to borrow milk if you're out and need some RIGHT NOW.
CON: The trash filling up in approximately eight seconds.
I haven't missed living with girls for even a second. Then you have to talk to other girls all the time and worry about whether they're secretly mad at you and won't admit it even though you try to ask them and be sensitive and all that crap. No one's clothes ever fit me, I didn't like their food or decor, and I was always the massive head of hair that sheds CONSTANTLY that everyone was mad at. I suppose I kinda miss people who enjoy Jane Austen movies and the like, but my husband likes a few.
No, no, I have never missed living with other girls - I only miss living without small children...
FIRST of all, JANSSEN, that Willy Wonka poster was awesome, not creepy. AND, I don't even think it was up all year because I'm pretty sure it kept falling down.
I miss the ability to drop things at a moment's notice to play a game of Nerts. My spouse doesn't play Nerts, but my roommates did.
I do not miss having to take out the trash and having to do everyone's dishes (which I did with Janssen most mornings).
I do not miss a certain roommate (not Janssen) leaving her dirty pots with mac and cheese or scrambled egg remnants on the stove for days at a time.
I do not miss whines from another roommate every time I made broccoli, which wasn't really that often.
I really hated the endless, endless giggling and crude movies at night whilst I was trying to sleep because I had early classes. This was especially obnoxious, because the two roommates who did this NEVER went into the other roommate's room, just mine.
And I must agree with the toilet paper thing. I think I realized, though, that it was just one roommate. When she was gone, we'd go through rolls like civilized people. When she was home, we went through it way fast.
Also, I had one roommate who I saw do the dishes a whopping 2 times, and she ALWAYS left TONS out on the counter and left nasty glasses of greasy bacon fat festering on the counter. And she ate my food.
Hmmm... apparently that brought out a whole torrent of things on my part. I should just copy and paste this onto my blog. ;)
Sadly, you still have to make compromises on pizza toppings. And living with a boy is oh, so very different. But better, I think. That way there's only one person shedding long hair around the house and clogging the vacuum with it.
Funny because Cicada was telling me just two days ago about her passive-aggressive battle with Murray over the thermostat. So it never ends. Give in now and get a cozy down throw.
I still miss some of my roomates because they became my best friends. So I miss the giggling and staying up late and watching TV together. But I've probably forgotten all the bad parts because this was like, 8 years ago.
No more roommates looking at gay porn on my computer.
The biggest thing I don't miss about roommates is the DRAMA. I have lived with some major drama queens. Hi, you're 32. That is TOO OLD to use the silent treatment on anyone.
Living with a boy is great in many ways, not the least of which is the cuddling and always having a date for major holidays. However, boys are DIRTY. Particularly my boy, I think.
Oh yes. I have never missed the phone sex in the closet with the moldy potatoes. Do you ever wonder what happened to her? Because I sure do.
I have lived alone for three years now and I can honestly say that I don't miss a single thing about roommates. I love having friends, just not sharing houses with them.
I am just the teensiest bit nervous about sharing a house with a boy, but I'm hoping I'll just get used to it...
I once lived alone for two months, when I was between roommates and not responsible for anyone's rent but my own. It was the shiz. Seriously, if housing weren't so freaking expensive in DC, I'd be out on my own in a heartbeat.
My biggest beef right now is that somehow, post college, I've always lived in a house of three girls. Two's company. Three's a crowd. And I always seem to be the odd one out. At least I mostly get along with the ones I live with right now, better than others I've lived with, even though they leave food out. You would think that women in their 30s would know how to keep a house clean.
I know I'm not perfect or anything, but I've never become best friends with anyone I've lived with and I envy those that have really great living situations.
Sorry for the looong comment, but it's something that's been bugging me this week, and I can't blog about it because my roommates read my blog. :)
Sex phone calls to boys on missions? There are no words for this.
Not miss:
* Planning X number of weddings before your own
* Listening to everyone compare date stories when you have none of your own.
* Roommates who went to church like once every six weeks and had every boy in the ward frothing at the mouth to sit by them when they did show.
Do you sense a theme?
Miss:
* I did have a few best friends with roomies. Women I still love dearly. Now there are NO women, and I find myself in a household of (sometimes) smelly boys.
* No one to lay around and eat chocolate with because we are all menstrating at the same time. Here there is no one to even talk to about being hormonal.
Getting used to living with a boy takes time. Getting used to living with one full grown boy plus two more under the age of five takes even longer.
One word of advice, and hopefully you will not have to do this, teach him to put his dirty clothes in the hamper as soon as you start living together. This will make laundry day run much smoother.
Miss Hass, I also sometimes wonder what happened to that girl. Were the moldy potatoes mine?
Miss Nem, I totally miss living with you, AA, Kip and Miss Hass. Though we did have some other roommates that were pretty difficult to live with. For me, at least, those were fun days despite the passive-aggressive fights over the thermostat.
Thermostat wars? Have you been home lately?
(psst: Cooldad is reading "Breaking Dawn" as we speak!)
PRO: Girl roommates don't leave the toilet seat up. Yes, I know I should check first, but at 2 in the morning, when I'm barely awake enough to get myself to the bathroom in the first place, I do not always remember to check first. I won't go on, but I could!
CON: I agree with what's been said about not knowing if your roomie's mad at you or not and if so, why.
PRO: Girls tend to be more inclined to clean than guys and it's fun to clean with a house full of girls where guys don't see it as that much of an accomplishment and it's just a big chore for them. Not that my guy doesn't do his fair share of it, but. . . it's a different thing for him.
CON: Girl talk pretty much whenever you want or need it and, at least in my case, plenty of people in the house at any given point of time. Plenty of people making "people are here" noises and plenty of people to cook for and be cooked for by.
I was so waiting for the cons of:
-Your roommate sneaks in a stinky illegal mouse (that lasts 2 days)
-Having a roomate that is obcessed with music you do not care for or have heard of
-Having a roommate that gives you weird unusual nicknames like "Eugene" and buys you a Jamaican hat
I did think you would put that there was a pro of sometimes having someone to read books to you as you use the bathroom!
On a personal note, I do miss having girl talk a lot! We would always talk about our crushes and 'love stories' and we were alies on the fight against the people who would sit outside our door and say "forget about it" for 2 hours in a bad Italian accent until we both wanted to scream!
I dont miss being accused of being the person who made a mess in the house I lived in. I purposefully bought 1 plate, 1 cup, 1 pan, 1 pot, 1 bowl. If neither of those thing were in the sink they were not my dishes to do!!! Although my room was always messy.
I don't miss the cattiness!
And for my room to get cool I had to shut the door of my 2 roomates room so the air would go through a vent to my room. Then they would come home, get mad at me for freezing their room, and my room would be like 110 degrees and I would sweat as I sleep.
Ahh! I love this subject--things I will not miss:
A roommate who thought, while the rest of us were gone for the weekend, that it would be a good idea for her to put contact paper up over our cinderblock walls and then paint it mauve. Yes mauve, not red, not pink, but dusty old woman mauve.
Cinderblock walls
A roommate who was obsessed with Lord of the Rings and who would, among other things, insist on speaking "Elfin" to me, hijack any boys who came over and talk to them incessantly about why Galadriel was a more important character than Arwen, and who decided to transcribe the entire trilogy by watching the movies in closed-caption and pausing/rewinding them over and over again so that she could write it all down. I like those movies and all, but COME ON!
A roommate who didn't understand the proper way to dispose of used feminine hygiene products. Yah.
A roommate who came home with 4 gallon-sized bottles of juice from Macey's and decided that since there wasn't enough room for all of them in the fridge (there were 6 of us and for some reason she had to have all of them in there at the same time), she was justified in emptying my half-full gallon of milk down the drain.
Things I will miss:
Nothing about the roommates I mentioned above, strangely enough.
Sitting in the Wendy's parking lot eating Frosties and dishing about our dates at 1:00 in the morning.
All-night finals cram sessions/final cleaning check preparations/dance parties at the end of the semester
Having a group of girls to rally around you and help you get ready for a big date--sharing clothes, makeup, doing each other's hair...
All-night "I Love The..." marathons on VH1. Okay, sometimes it was all-night "Newlyweds" marathons with Jessica and Nick on MTV. We were freaks, I know.
I've discovered that my inner slob has really come out since I've been married. I guess I was always fanatical about setting an example for my roommate by keeping the common areas clean, and I was very intolerant about anything left out. This was post-BYU, of course, when I only had one roommate. I was pretty good about keeping things clean when we first got married. But then, I guess we just started accumulating a lot of junk. And running out of places to put that junk. And since David didn't care about the mess, I stopped caring about it too. Now I only clean when we have company coming over, or when I really can't take it anymore. Of course, it doesn't help that I'm totally sick of my apartment and my lazy landlord never fixing anything. Once we buy a house or condo I think I'll be much more diligent about keeping it clean.
Keirsten, you just reminded me of one of my best Finals Cramming Sessions ever. We danced around and sang in the living room to the entire Beatles 1 album, using kitchen utensils as microphones.
Sigh . . . good times.
My mom called my this morning to ask why I don't comment on your blog anymore. I guess she really felt that I needed to say something about this post, but really I just hadn't seen it yet.
So. I resolved the female roommate dilemma by moving in with brothers. Brothers are so much better than female roommates. There's no cattiness. No harbored resentment. If my brother needs to clean his dishes, I can tell him so and he won't secretly hate me for a week.
And then I upgraded from brothers to husband, and it's wonderful. The toilet seat thing didn't last too long at all. And it's like every night is a slumber party where you get to talk till you fall asleep and tell jokes.
Things I don't miss about female roommates:
The used tampon applicator that was left in the middle of my bedroom floor.
The piles of dishes, and my two-week clean-everyone-else's dish strike that resulted in the entire kitchen being covered in dirty dishes and me breaking down and spending four hours cleaning them all.
My emptying out the fridge that was packed to the brim with food and no longer could refrigerate or freeze properly, only to find that ALL the food inside had expired and there was yogurt in there that had expired a year previously.
The icy cold stares at the suggestion that someone else do the cleaning.
Ohhhhhhhh, the white board!! I could write a whole post about it.
The roommate who thought it was nice to turn off my alarm before I'd woken up, and not actually make sure that I was awake and able to get to work on time.
What I do miss:
Watching teen movies that I would never admit to anyone I secretly wanted to see.
Eating great recipes that I never would have thought to try myself.
That's about all I can think of. Most of the good roommate stuff is stuff that I still get to enjoy living with Murray.
I've been trying to convince my brother to move to DC since he got off his mission in October. No success so far. As much as I love my little sister, I have made no such overtures to her. :)
Wow, you have all done a pretty good job of cover everything I won't miss and many of the things I will. I can especially relate to the two-week dish strike that then took four hours to resolve.
I will miss coming in or getting off the phone in exasperation and saying "how can boys be so dumb!" and having an instant audience. I will also miss people being excited about my new clothes, or impromptu card games that last forever, or hours of venting and bonding time.
I won't miss having my guy friend being exiled from the apartment for refusing to have his picture taken wearing the sponge bob, or movies or TV on Sundays and other times that I just want some peace (especially when it's too cold outside to escape and go somewhere else), or the things engaged roommates do and talk about. Yeah.
I'll probably miss more about living with roommates once I don't have them anymore.
I know I already commented once, but I thought of something about the toilet seat! Early in my marriage somebody told me that if the seat was ever left up, I should call my husband in from whatever he was doing to put it down. She even woke her husband up once in the middle of the night to put the seat down for her. Apparently he never left it up after that.
I used the same tactic, but I wasn't a Nazi about it. If I found the seat up, I screamed, and then Spouse came rushing in to help me only to realize that I was just frightened by the unsightly toilet bowl. Usually now I just tell him that somebody broke into our flat for the sole purpose of leaving the toilet seat up. Or putting dirty socks on the floor. Or whatever.
I actually really missed living with girls when I got married. There was always something going on, always someone willing to lend you their shirt, always good stories from someone's crazy date last night. Marriage is great, obviously, but I felt kind of lonely after living with girls for several years.
However, I do not miss my naked roommate. And yes, she was every bit as naked as you're imagining.
And I don't miss the passive aggressive notes about dish washing or the wondering where my favorite shoes went. Or the roommates who always thought they were in love or the ones who grumped if they didn't have a date every weekend.
They both have their bright shiny moments and their not so pleasant times. Living with a boy was an adjustment, but I think I prefer it.
A group of girls just home from camping are both cleaner and sweeter-smelling than one single boy...
I don't miss:
...coming home to find all my kitchen cupboards rearranged (housemate I had while looking after my parents home when dad took a job interstate).
...finding out that the phone has been cut off because my flatmate forgot that the money in her purse had come from me for the phone bill and got her hair cut and coloured with it.
I do miss:
...reading books out loud together before bed.
...the in-jokes and shared understandings
...helping one housemate raise her little girl. She's 16 now and still feels like half mine. :)
42+?? There should be a gold-edged merit badge for that.
The TP thing will still be a problem. I will put a new roll on in the morning and by mid-afternoon, it is all gone. Not sure if my hubby brushes his teeth with it or uses it in place of a wash rag in the shower but it goes fast.
Oh...and having someone else in bed with you is great at first but then you realize that sleep must come eventually and not being able to spread out like before is rough.
I enjoyed reading this blog and comments.
I have a question for you. How do you train a woman to leave the toilet lid down? I don't like looking into a toilet, seat up or down, and things might fall into an open toilet. Flushing with the toilet lid open spreads germs around the bathroom.
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