Clothing for them and for me was not a big issue. By then they were eschewing the cute, sample sale stuff for no-name jeans and cotton turtlenecks and sweatshirts from Costco. I sewed for them Christmas dresses and flannelette nighties.

In those days, we had no tv weekdays. Our older kids had never been big into tv. They watched a few of the PBS shows (Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Mr. Dressup), but that was about it. YTV wasn't on the air, at least not at our house, and we really tried to shield our kids from commercial tv, to avoid bringing violence and rampant consumerism into our home while they were young and so impressionable.

But you can only stem the tide for so long, and by the time they were eleven or twelve, they wanted certain clothes. Like a certain style and make of jean or overall or a v-necked top from a particular store. They were going for a look. These certain articles of clothing are never cheap. The jeans cost seventy bucks, and that little v-neck shirt with three quarter sleeves is thirty-six. Ouch. This is clothing for kids who are still growing, and you are not entirely sure whether they still like to slide down the gravel hill at the school with their buddies on their butts at lunch hour. Our middle daughter gets mysterious holes in her clothes and then confesses with those big gorgeous green eyes rolling in surprise that she doesn't know how they got there. Hmmm.

Not only do these clothes cost a lot of money, take unbelievable abuse that foreshortens their life, and become too small too fast on kids who are sprouting like daffodils, but they take up a lot of room in the washing machine. Not to mention that these kids change, oh, five or six times a day.

So mixed with my Levi's, at which they turn up their little noses, are their Mavis and their Silvers and their Miss Sixty's. But, I don't see their jeans in the laundry pile that much any more. That's because, one day in disgust, I decided I would no longer do dirty laundry collection from their rooms.

Rooms can be a real bone of contention between parents and children. Just ask me and my folks. My parents' strategy was to berate me for the mess, and then my mother would give up and clean it. It worked for me. That was until my mother spring cleaned my room and found and then threw out my journal. Ouch.

And any kid with a dirty room has a lot of dirty clothes lurking in it. The problem is sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from the clean ones. Everything, once lovingly washed and dried and folded and delivered to a room by me, was either jammed into drawers or left on top of the dirty washing pile in the closet. It doesn't take long for chaos to reign.

So one day, after too much ranting, I just thought to myself "don't go there any more." I announced at the family dinner that night, in the most amiable, even voice that I could muster under the circumstances, that I would no longer be picking up clothes to be laundered, nor be delivering clothes once they were clean. Their job would be to collect any clothes they would like to be washed with the family loads that I usually try to get out of the way on Monday, but tend to loll around the kitchen floor until Tuesday or even Wednesday, and deliver them to the kitchen where the washing machine and dryer roost. If they miss that opportunity, they're on their own. Of course, they are welcome to use the machine any time I am not needing it.

...../3