Careful what you wish for

I am standing in my son's room, mouth agape. I'm here doing inspection, and this chaos … well, it's not exactly unbelievable, but it certainly is unexpected.

I mean, I knew it was messy, but this … I'm in complete shock, because, in the broader sense, what happened here? For years, my son had a tidy, organized room. Except for socks that didn't quite make it into the hamper, and the occasional mound of Legos, his room was neat.

It was neat! And now … but ohhh, I realize as I gaze at what now looks like a tornado landing site. Right. We made a big change recently. We took my son's loft bed down. We got him a regular bed, on the floor, and introduced a bedside table. When it was all done, my son appraised his theme-free, cool and casual, more teenage room. "This is awesome," he said. And it was.

But it's not awesome anymore, I think grimly. I survey the mess -- the one, two, three cups on the bedside table, plus empty juice bottles on the floor. There are books lying along the length of that new bed, though the bookcase is just feet away. There's a snake's nest of jeans in the middle of the floor, and lone socks scattered around. Two dresser drawers are par-tially open, one with a T-shirt dangling sadly over the edge.

The yard-sale easy chair seems to be permanently reclining, its back angled away and footrest jutting out, and every surface -- back, seat, and footrest -- is covered with clothes … could be clean, could be dirty, I can't tell. The bed is a tangle of blankets and sheets, and I don't see the pillow. Even the shade on the window at the head of the bed is crooked, sloppy, wrong.

I look and I look, and the "how" comes to me as my mind's eye lines up the "before" and "after" pictures of my son's bedroom. Having the bed on the ground means my seventh-grader sits on it during the day, actually hangs out here. Now he brings snacks

upstairs, with cups and bowls and wrappers, and apparently leaves them wherever he puts them. The cups take up all the space on the table, so at night he drops his books onto the floor. Doing homework here creates crumpled papers and abandoned pencils. He pitches his dirty clothes from the bed, and they miss and land all over the chair. The dresser … well, I don't know about the open drawers. I can't find a way to blame that on the new bed.

It's breathtaking, and I am just about to yell, "You were supposed to clean up in here," when I remember, and I pick my way across the floor. I slide open the door, and there it is, a model closet.

Shirts buttoned onto hangers, shoes on the rack, slacks folded on shelves, empty backpacks and duffels together in the corner -- his closet. I only told him to clean his closet.

Lianne Wilkens lives with her family in Manassas. She can be reached at liannewilkens@hotmail.com.