Fun Friday – Mission Impossible-What happens when teens fail to report for duty?

"Are you kidding me?" The look of finding your house in disarray.
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Most days when I awake, I greet my day as a mom on a mission, ready to conquer the world. Then there are days where I feel as though I am on an impossible mission. My most recent mission was to ease into my morning sipping a cup of Hazelnut coffee, listening to smooth jazz and working on my latest writing project.

It was an early Saturday morning, darkness still enveloped the sky as I slid from bed and put on my fleece housecoat. Not wanting to wake my sleeping cherubs (teen boys), I tiptoed from my bedroom into my writing space. After organizing my space, I decided to look in on the boys before making my coffee.

I checked bedroom number one…no boys. I checked bedroom number two…only crumpled covers. My next thought was that the boys must have decided to sleep in the living room again, after playing their game station. But they weren’t there either.

Upon further investigation, I found a hand scribbled note that read, “Ma, we went to early morning workouts.” I dropped the note back onto the table and headed to the kitchen to make coffee.  As I made the first step into the kitchen, I thought I was in the middle of a war zone. The boys had left the kitchen in a disaster from the night before.

My options were to leave the mess until my sons returned or clean it and fuss at when they returned. I tried to wait for their return, but after a couple of hours, I couldn’t take the site anymore. So I cleaned.

Not only did I clean the kitchen, but my rampage drifted into the living room where I picked up blankets, game controllers and empty microwave popcorn bags. Once I was done cleaning the boys dragged in as though they had worked a full day. I began talking right away, “You should have checked with me before you left the house. There were things for you to do.”

The family spokesman, my fifteen-year-old, said, “You were asleep, we didn’t want to wake you.”

Before I could respond, my older son looked around the house and said, “You did a good job Mama. The house looks good.” That was his attempt to distract me from the fact that neither of them helped me clean.

My impossible mission was twofold – to relax and write; to have a clean house (at least on the surface). The mission was accomplished, but not without compromise. The next time I have a mission that involves my teens, I’ll be sure to spell out the ground rules.

How do you turn a Mission Impossible into a mission accomplished?