My baby's coming home. This morning I have been a domestic goddess, or as close as I can do. Her bedroom is polished, vacuumed (the word hoover being banished from our house by order of Mr C) and everything put back in its place, so now it looks how it did when I did it all last time, during the week after she left for Uni. She has fresh sheets on her bed, and all of her things which had been moved in order to transform the room into L's beauty parlour (think Frenchie from Grease and you won't be far off!) have been returned to their home.
She called me yesterday, and said that one of the things that she has missed most has been her bedroom. My only concern is that she won't now recognise it. It now smells of polish, and the carpet is clearly visible. The surfaces are free from dust and empty monster munch packets, and if you move the quilt, you will only find a clean sheet beneath it, instead of piles of clean, folded laundry and more empty packets of monster munch and Bel Vita wrappers. There are no headphones or charging cable booby traps lying inches above the floor ready to trip me up, and the desk is not layered with finely powdered highlighter and eye shadow, and a mountain of eyebrow paraphernalia.
Once again, I can see exactly where I am going wrong, even before she walks through the door. She will take great delight at her beautifully shining bedroom, immediately emptying drawers and storage boxes to find all of the things she hasn't seen for 6 weeks.
Then she will empty her suitcase to find a charger or some other essential tool that she cannot survive without, and cover the carpet with the contents. And then she will roll herself up in her clean bedding and stay like that for the next week. And I with my high expectations at being reunited with my eldest daughter will be sad and grumpy that she doesn't want to spend every waking moment with me, having forgotten her bat-like behaviour of the last few years, and shrinking her in my mind back to the little girl she was aged 5 or 6. And then I will get cross that she is making such a mess and drinking all the milk and is still in her pyjamas at 6pm. What I should have done was to empty the contents of her drawers onto the floor, sprinkle the fluff and grit from the vacuum cleaner over the floor and surfaces and hide the bread and milk in the boot of my car.
But I know that even if it only stays tidy for a few minutes once she's home, and even if she reverts to her bat-like existence as soon as she walks through the door, I would still much rather have that, than a tidy empty room. She may sometimes be a sunshine covered with big angry clouds, but she's still my sunshine.
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