Webster’s gives two definitions of the word “chore.” The first is “a small job that is done regularly.” The second is “a dull, unpleasant, or difficult job or experience.”
Guess which definition parents agree with, which one their kids agree with – that is, if the kids even know what “chores” are these days.
According to a recent news article published in this very paper, a survey conducted by Whirlpool revealed that “while 82 percent of Americans did chores as a child, only 28 percent are assigning them to children today.” Even giving kids an allowance for chores done doesn’t seem to work anymore, the article goes on to stipulate.
My mother, I must say, got around this very neatly by not giving us an allowance in the first place. That did not, however, get us out of doing certain onerous deeds. Somehow, we just expected it as our lot in life — sort of like black-and-white TV and milk at every meal.
It was a given that we made our own beds and tidied up our rooms, even at an early age. As we got older, the chores were divided up by gender and geography. My brothers were assigned outdoor chores, such as watering trees and shrubs, pulling weeds, and tormenting various and sundry bugs. I was assigned kitchen duty, usually at the kitchen sink.
I can’t even begin to estimate the mountains of dishes I must have washed from about the age of, oh, 9 or so, until I escaped — or so I thought — into marriage at 19. Never mind that I did not come into possession of my own dishwasher until I was 24. Funny thing, my mother got her first automatic dishwasher just months after I left her house – a fact I regularly brought up to her with some satisfaction, if only on my part.
Not only was a dishwasher missing when I grew up, but the same could be said for a clothes dryer. Every Saturday morning found me shuffling beneath the myriad clotheslines in our backyard, hanging up everything from sheets and towels to underwear and blue jeans. That afternoon, I’d gather it in, dry and stiffened by wind and sun. Then I’d fold it and put it all away.
A lot of it wound up in the ironing box, where it was my chore to also do much of the ironing. Perma-press? What the heck was that?
Bathroom cleaning also fell to me by the time I hit my teens. Luckily, we only had one small bathroom with — tub-shower, sink and toilet. By then I had a small, portable radio that I hauled into the bathroom with me. Somehow, Top 40 and Ajax got me through it.
This is not to say that my mother, who also held down a full-time job, was lying on the couch eating bonbons while I was slaving away. More likely, she was down on her knees waxing the kitchen floor, or whipping up yet another meal on a budget stretched to the limit to feed a family of five.
By the time our own kids came along, there was a dishwasher and clothes dryer in the house. No more fights over who got to wash and who got to dry.
But the kids were still expected to clean their own rooms, feed the dog, and help with outside chores — which meant our son was tasked with mowing the lawn and our daughter with cleaning the pool.
Funny thing is, it wasn’t too long after they both left home that we went looking for and bought another home — one, they both quickly pointed out — bereft of both grass and pool.
