A Towel in Distress

Everyone has pet peeves, and one of mine is when a towel is bunched up and not spread out and hung on the towel bar.  

Strangely enough, pet peeves don't become pet peeves until there is a someone who decides to make it a pet peeve for you.  In this particular case, that "someone" is my kids. 

My two brilliant kids (age 7 & 8) have decided that a towel bar couldn't just be a towel bar anymore.  They have conspired that a towel bar should doubled as a monkey bar when they brushed their teeth.  A support beam it should be when they dried themselves out of the bathtub.  It also functioned as a display pole for their miscellaneous toys which have occasionally decided to grace their presence in the bathroom.   

Sure, towels still "technically" went on the bar, but the length of the towel was never stretched out with its equal ends met at the bottom.  The towel bar never bisected a towel properly or equally. The towels were always somehow haphazardly thrown atop of the bar.  Any Bed Bath and Beyond employee or OCD sufferer might have an anxiety attack on how untidy that scrunched up wet mess might make an entire bathroom look.  But I, on the other hand, had a more serious concern: the wet towel never got to be dried. In the presence of wet, unvented towels, I could hear the entire microscopic community of mold and mildew shouting yippee dee do and hurrah.  To rid of the stench, wash days had to be scheduled more frequently, which wasn't really helping the state drought water restriction. And then I got complains from the users on how the wet towels were cold when they tried to use it the next day.

I supposed I should be thankful that the wet towels weren't thrown on the floor next to a trash can or ended up on the beds. But seriously, how difficult is it to manually adjust a piece of fabric on a simple straight line?  I'm not asking them to make a towel origami like they do on a cruise ship.  I'm not asking them to fold it up like a table napkin in a Michelin-starred restaurant.  I'm not even asking them to fold in my own very specific way, either.  No folding!  Just hang the towel up.  A rectangular-shaped terry clothed bath towel of 30 inches wide by 58 inches long should only take less than 0.36 seconds for an adult to hang properly.  For a child, I'd add a second or two more.  

For too long, my constant high-pitched reminder and persistent harassing and nagging yielded no concrete change on their behavior.  I tried to "stand it" silently, but all that negative energy brooding inside me wasn't going to go anywhere.  I was seriously thinking about defacing the bathroom walls and changing the bar into hooks instead.  This ragging war could really put a dent in our parent-child relationship. I actually knew couples that contemplated divorce because they fought over whether to squeeze a toothpaste from the end or at the middle (If you or anyone you know have this problem, schedule a private consultation with me. :)

As I wistfully browsed the catalog of Restoration Hardware for replacement bathroom hooks one night, it daunted on me. Maybe there was a easier and cheaper way to deal with this entire debacle.  I took out a sheet of Post-It and scribbled: 

Help!  

I can feel the mold growing inside me. :P

Somebody please straighten me out!

Thanks.

Your Towel 
                        in Distress

I stuck the Post-It note right above the bunched-up towel and waited in silence. 

Kids discovered the note next day when they took their showers. I was cooking dinner as they shouted across the rooms and asked if I wrote the note.  My reply then was that I couldn't hear what they said because the stove vent was on. The truth was, I haven't prepared on what I should say to them just yet.  I could hear them studying that peculiar note upstairs, sounding out the words and wondering out loud if mommy had written the note or how the note has come about.  

Right before bedtime, we met in the hallway as they were brushing their teeth. They stopped and asked me, 

"Mommy, did you see this note?  Who wrote this?"

I could see that the note was taken down and placed back up again.  I looked at them straight in the eye and said as a matter of fact,

"Your towel wrote it."

Their reaction was simply priceless.  They burst out laughing, nodded fiercely and doubled over with their hands on their tummies.  Austin gave me a thumbs-up sign.  

I returned to their bathroom after they've gone to bed.  And what I've found was one magnificent, glorious sight: a straightened towel on the towel bar.  So straight and panned out like it was freshly pressed and ironed.  More amazingly, the towel was placed strategically right dead in the center, like a staged prop in a million-dollar model home.  

And believe it or not, the note stayed put as the towel stayed straightened for the weeks onward.

One simple note saved my wallet from buying extra hooks and my bathroom wall from extra holes.  One simple note saved my vocal chord from going off pitch and my sanity from going hysterical.  One simple note saved our relationship with humor and imagination.  

Life is beautiful again.