It’s interesting thinking about how I grew up v. how my kids are growing up. There seem to be some pretty stark differences, but when i step back, there are a lot of odd similarities as well.

Chores is a big one. I don’t like assigning chores to our girls. I want them to help out around the house because they live there and taking care of the house is just what you do when you’re part of a family. It’s been over a decade and I still can’t get them to just notice something that needs doing and do it. I digress.

The only real “chores” they have are the dishes (loading and unloading the dishwasher and clearing the table after meals) and starting their laundry (we have a top loader – which you can pry from my cold, dead hands – and they can’t reach all the way in to move clothes to the dryer). So they have to do dishes every day and laundry once a week. That’s it.

My husband had a lot of chores growing up…cleaning out the garage, dishes, laundry, tidying the house, lawn care, you name it, he probably had to do it. So he’s not afraid of giving the girls a little extra work around the house.

Me? When I really think about it, the only chore I was routinely required to do was…dishes. (Except, until I was about 13, we didn’t have a dishwasher so everything got done by hand.) If I wanted to make money, I had to mow the lawn…and let me tell you: mowing two acres of grass with the world’s oldest and heaviest lawnmower that was NOT self-propelled is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. So rude of my dad to get rid of the riding mower just when I was old enough to start handling the lawn.

It’s weird to think that I didn’t do my own laundry until I went to college. No shit. My mom – who worked full time as a foreign language teacher at my school – did all our laundry every single week. My dad handled all the trash (it was a whole damn thing because of where we lived and the fact we heated our house primarily with a wood-burning fireplace).

So there are reasons my childhood was weird and often felt simply not normal, but chores certainly wasn’t one of the reasons. I guess I hope my own kids can someday look back on their childhood and think, “Wow. They really did do a lot of shit for us.”

Even if it’s 25 years after they move out of our house.