We’ve All Been There: The Parental Visit

It’s Parent Weekend, or your birthday, or just a Thursday night and you’re craving a free meal a la parentals. Either way, your parents are coming to campus and that means one thing and one thing only: it’s time to clean.

It’s not like your place is dirty – at least by your standards – but something about having mom and dad sit on that couch (where your roommate hooked up last night and – oh! – her bra is stuffed between the cushions) is just not right.
You don’t need your parents seeing the cans from last night’s impromptu party, or the empty Doritos bags littering your
bedroom floor.

You run home from class/work and get moving on the deep clean. You start with your bedroom. You fold all of the clothes that have been piled on your floor for three weeks and put them away.  After you make your bed, you decide some vacuuming is in order. Good idea, too, as you find some less than parent-friendly goodies (your bowl or some empty condom wrappers, perhaps?) under the bed. You remove the dirty dishes (AKA the cereal bowl from last week filled with congealed milk) from your desk and replace them with books and binders.

You take a moment to survey the room. It just screams, “I’m studious!”

You light a candle to cover up the smell of dirty sheets and move onto the kitchen. You begin sweating as you quickly clean all the dishes in the sink and stacked on top of the microwave.  Most of them are shot glasses. Once they are all glistening in the drying rack, you make your way around your place picking up bottles and beer cans. You pause at the bookshelves and contemplate removing your collection of Smirnoff bottles that have been on display for months. On the one hand, you don’t need your parents to see how much you and your friends drink/pride yourselves on it, but on the other hand, you’ve been working on that collection forever! You can’t just throw it away now.

You decide to leave the bottles and hope your parents don’t comment on them.

With only 30 minutes until their arrival, you do a quick Swiffer/vacuum job, organize the Us Weekly’s on the coffee table and throw your roommates’ stuff into their rooms. When you are done you take a moment to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Your place is spotless. Like, really spotless. Like, it hasn’t been this clean since the last time the parents were in town.

But, wait! There is one more thing. You run to the kitchen and take an inventory of the photos on the fridge. You yank down the one of you bonging the beer, dressed up as a slutty Nun for Halloween and the one of you using your Psych text book as a flip cup “table.” On second thought, you yank them all down. Your parents don’t need to see that.

As you are putting them into a drawer in the kitchen, there is a knock on the door. Proud of your accomplishments, you open it up and let your parents in.

“This place smells like stale beer,” your mother says, a look of disgust on her face.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. At least she didn’t see what it looked like before…