My Son's Bedroom

First of all, my family is not the neatest in the world. My kids could not keep a clean room if their life depended on it. My wife is oblivious to it, but it bothers me. In the past I spent a lot of time upset about messy rooms, and the house in general. No matter how mad I got, it just didn't make much difference. I guess if it's not a "united front" about something like that, the kids just aren't going to do it. Over time I realized that I could spend a lot of time getting upset at my family, having them upset at me, and making little difference in the messiness, or I could learn to live with it. So while it's not easy and I can't live with everything, I've learned to live with messiness, and I tend to overlook messy bedrooms. In a family of messy bedrooms, my 20 year old son has the messiest. It's truly awful, you walk in and kick a path open as you go. I just take a deep breath, count to 10, and walk past his door.

We'd been experiencing some outage on our cable internet lately, so they sent out a service tech to check our lines. We were chatting as he was working, he was a nice guy. He told me he thought he'd been to our house on a service call before. I didn't remember, but he kept talking saying he thought we were one of his first service calls over 3 years ago. He remembered because of the way they wired our house. All checked out OK, so he asked to see our cable modem. I gulped, because the modem is in my son's room. I told him I wasn't expecting this, that they were supposed to check outside lines only. He was insistent, so I told him the modem was in my son's room, and his room was not in the best condition. He laughed, and said he'd probably seen worse. So I opened the bedroom door, he looked in and said softly...

"Oh yeah - I remember this."