Our three children were all untidy teenagers, though our youngest was spectacularly slovenly into her 20s. It was fine when she was inflicting her lack of standards on flatmates, but things got a little tense when she left university and moved back home. We’d always felt that foul teenage habits sorted themselves out, and her older siblings proved that, especially when they started dating. So when she came home because of lockdown we were unprepared for her total lack of interest in tidiness and cleanliness.
Her new job was put on hold and then disappeared, most of her friends were scattered countrywide and she was bored and unmotivated. Sadly, she didn’t fill the hours by helping with chores, though she liked food being prepared for her and was happy to have her clothes washed and ironed. She then left them in piles around her cluttered and dirty bedroom floor, which drove her mother demented. Most of the tidying up fell to my wife as she was working from home, so she says I don’t know the half of it.
Our older children were on the career/mortgage path by then, so the youngest felt even worse stuck at home. She couldn’t move out fast enough when things went back to normal though happily returns for meals and weekends, and we’re delighted to see her. When she left, however, her room smelled so awful we practically sterilised it, and we changed all the décor.
She recently announced she wanted to move back in with us while she “saves for a mortgage”, and my wife couldn’t be less keen. It’s five years since that last prolonged stay, and she told our daughter that she was still scarred – joking but not joking at all. Our home is as neat as you’d expect from two tidy 60-year-olds, and we like it that way. I think it’s really hard for young people to buy a home now, and I’m sure she’ll have matured a bit, so my first instinct was to say yes. Except it was a firm no from my wife, who says she’d be taken for granted again and our daughter would reduce our home to a shambles, with all the rows that would follow.
She briskly explained this, and our daughter was very shamefaced but also very upset. My wife said the last time we’d been in her flat it was a total tip – and she knew we were coming, as we were dropping off something she’d asked for – so she didn’t feel our daughter’s habits had changed. I feel caught between the two of them. I couldn’t argue with my wife’s assessment of the flat, but our daughter swore she would change and begged her mother to help her get her own home.
I felt I was persuading my wife to at least consider it, and reminded her that our older children had stayed at home rent-free while saving. Then she showed me a list of dos and don’ts our daughter would have to follow if she moved back. It reads as if she’s a selfish teenager, not a grown woman. I’m pretty sure she’ll respect her mother’s wishes without having them spelt out in black and white, but my wife says if there’s any hope of our living together happily, then she needs ground rules agreed from the outset, especially if it’s a couple of years. She also said that if it wasn’t working, then she’d need to move out, which I think would be awful for everyone. I just don’t know what to do for the best.