Epic Failure

In the past month or so,  I have verbally reinforced to all who live here my preferences for what I consider 'clean'.  Guidelines for the kitchen, certain things in the bathroom, my disdain for walking into the house and having to navigate through shoes, backpacks, musical equipment dropped wherever they land in the entry as I make my way into the house.  Makes me grumpy.  I've asked nicely, explained my reasons and thought that was all I needed to do to have compliance.  These are young adults after all,  not toddlers.  Reason should work.  Respect for my wishes should come into play.  

Not so much. There was some compliance, but also a fair amount of passive, plausible deniability on the part of some, some who felt like it wasn't 'their turn' or just flat out defiance.  So, in a moment of brilliance, (fit of rage) to get my point across, I created two card stock notices.  One sits on the piano and the other on the window sill above the kitchen sink.  These were created almost two weeks ago and I've been pleased with the level of compliance since setting them out.  I even took pictures of them to use in this blog, but when  l last blogged, I went in another direction that I first thought, and completely forgot about the pictures.  And I want to say, that since posting the notes, compliance has been pretty darned good.  This pleased me.

Fast forward to tonight.  I turn on my laptop, and yeah, hadn't been using it much, and Jared used it today at my office, so when I noticed two icons on my desktop, one a picture of the note on the piano and the other the note on the sink w/ 'REALLY' typed under it, I was angry.  I wanted to know who had used their passive/aggressive behaviors to take a picture of the notes, then downloaded them to my computer and posted them on my desktop.  I wasn't just angry, I felt violated, that my personal space had been invaded without my permission.  I txted Mike to make sure he hadn't done it in a moment of messing with my head.  No, he hadn't.  So I did the next thing I could think of.  I sent out a message on facebook to the four who are here full time and to a few other part timers, outlining my anger and feelings of violation and requesting that if they wanted to be treated as grown ups, start acting like one.

About 33 mins later as I signed on to my blog to write, the light went on.  I remembered taking the pictures, sending them to myself and posting them to my desktop for easy finding for my blog.  Epic failure.  REALLY epic failure.  Yes, I've apologized to said kids.  So far no one wants to hang me or burn me at the cross, wouldn't blame them if they did.  On the other hand, I'm also thinking it's opened up some serious dialog about how important certain aspects to order in house mean to me.  Time will tell.  It's early. Oh, and the 'REALLY' was my doing as well, when I downloaded them, I labeled them wrong, and 'REALLY' was denoting the 'real' note from the piano.  How is it I totally forgot this??  Lord, constantly I'm crying out for your guidance, YOUR guidance, not mine.  I actually feel wretched.  Help me to take a breath, count to ten and use my brain.  Forgive me falling flat on my face yet again. I don't really like it here, I'd like to not do that again. Amen.