2017-06-30

OK, you already know I'm not particularly religious. Nevertheless, the Bible has quite a lot of good advice. The bit I'm talking about today is the Fourth Commandment (or the Fifth, depending on which numbering system you use).

Honor thy father and thy mother

I want you to notice something. It doesn't say to honor them if they're worthy. It doesn't say to honor them if you agree with them.

There's a Wikipedia article on this...take a few minutes to read it.

Now, you and I have always gotten along fairly well. But you've been fighting with your mother for years, and that's just wrong. You need to cooperate with her; when she tells you to do something, don't argue, just do it. If you don't see the reason for some task, you can ask her to explain...after you've finished it.

Does all this mean that you're always wrong when you disagree with your mother? No, even she can make mistakes. But she's got a lot more experience than you; if you find yourself disagreeing with her, you should consider that. I'd guess that the odds of you being right and your mother being wrong are around 1 in 50.

You're always complaining that the tasks you're given aren't your responsibility: you didn't get the bathroom dirty, so you shouldn't have to clean it; or it's not your house, so you shouldn't have to mow the lawn. And so on. No. You live in the house, and it's your responsibility to help maintain it. Some of the things you do create work that you can't do, because of your age or size. Other people create other work, and you can handle some of those chores. The work is shared around, according to each person's capacities.

On a related note, I find your revulsion at cleaning the bathroom amusing. When I was a little kid, my parents and I lived on a farm. Farms (most of them) have animals, and it's necessary from time to time to clean up after them. As a teenager, I literally stood in six inches of accumulated cow poop (wearing rubber boots, of course) and shoveled the stuff into a wagon so Dad could drive it out into the fields and spread it around as fertilizer. I've done a similar job cleaning out a chicken coop, when I was six years old. (Chicken waste is nastier, by the way.)

Pulling on a pair of rubber gloves and scrubbing the bathroom floor is nothing, compared to that.