The PURGE

All my mom friends are tired right now! The end of school activities are about to do us in, we need summer to be here. We need less time in the mini-van and more time at home (preferably with the kids playing outside). Remember when you were a kid and your mom started hollering “go play outside!”, or my favorite, “in or out!” We are at the end. We need no more activities or recitals or soccer games.

Today I went to get some plastic “glad”ware out of the cupboard to put away the pasta salad I had made. I found no plastic containers. Where are all the plastic containers, I pondered? Then I looked over at the fridge and realized…I’ve been so busy that I hadn’t done THE PURGE. You know - the refrigerator purge.

I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t purged in a long time, and well, it was pretty disgusting. I guess I just quit seeing it when I opened the fridge (where was Slim?). Luckily my kids are old enough I don’t have to worry about anyone actually trying to eat anything out of there! There comes a time in every girl’s life when she must learn from her mother those household tasks that she will be expected to do someday as a mother herself, because NO ONE ELSE will do them. This includes among other things: cleaning up puke, removing lice from hair, cutting someone else’s finger nails, putting away the clean laundry, changing the toilet paper rolls, and purging the fridge.

I called the girls in and began directing the purge. “Take out all the old plastic containers that look like they have dead food in them, and put them on the kitchen table.” You would have thought I’d asked them to clean up dog poop off the carpet or something like that (another task reserved for mothers). Then they started giving me lip, “Mom, we ate this spaghetti and bean balls for supper like 4 weeks ago!” or “I can’t even tell what this was!” and my favorite from Hermoine, “I think the swine flu actually started in our refrigerator.” When it came time to open the containers, the real fun began. Some seriously gross stuff was in there, and they just flat out refused to dump the contents into the trash. I used an old carrot to scrape out the molded contents, as Taz screamed, “it smells awful in here!” She ran and got a handkerchief, wrapped it around her face for what she called “maximum defensive from stinkiness.” I didn’t think it was that bad, really. I’d seen worse. It didn’t really help that Slim had just finished putting some fresh “organic” mulch in the yard, which smelled like chicken poop.