what works...

As a mother. there are now two things that I know for sure work.

The first I just figured out.  If you have, as I do, a houseful of teenage boys, then those teenage boys take showers in direct proportion to whether or not they have a girlfriend or hope to have a girlfriend.  This means they take a lot of showers.  And upon exiting their showers, there is a good chance those boys will leave their towels in small heaps wherever they happen to be when they find their clothes.  This is sometimes in front of their closets, but occasionally in the laundry room where they pick out of the clean piles of laundry only the items of clothes they need for that precise moment or possibly in front of their brother's closet from which they have pilfered a clean t-shirt.  The no-longer-needed towels are simply abandoned.  When the boys encounter them, usually on their way to get a fresh towel from the linen closet, they step carefully over them.  When you encounter them, you pick them up (if you are wise you use tongs) and take them to the laundry.

No matter how carefully you and your Mate may husband your towels for a week between washes, your efforts to conserve water, energy and time will all be for naught as your wastrel children discard towels with astonishing frequency.  And the washing machine is always on, always running, always full of towels...

Or at least that's what happened in our house.  No matter how much I insisted that in the interests of all that is holy (my sanity first, global warming second), towels were only to be washed once a week, I was utterly and completely ignored.

Tricky little bastards. They had me. They knew it. They loved it. And they didn't show they loved it.  That's how tricky they are.

It took me a while to figure out one part of the problem. 

Me.

The quickest way to solve a problem you have with your children is to figure out how you are part of the problem.

In this case, I realized that, like a simpleton, I had for some reason (I'm sure I had a reason) bought all our towels in the same shade of khaki.  It was thus impossible to determine who was responsible for any of the many towels that popped up all over our floors like a pride of prairie dogs. When accosted, in a rare show of solidarity, all the boys claimed innocence and refused to rat each other out.

I was stymied.  Drat them.

And then the solution, like Diana from the forehead of Zeus, sprung fully formed from my head. Blindly obeying my stroke of genius, I hopped in the car and headed to Bed, Bath and Beyond.  There, I purchased two towels in each child's favorite color.  As I handed Oldest his blue towels, and Middle his red towels, and Youngest his white towels, I told them that from now on they were to only use their own towels and those towels would be washed once a week and that if they wanted to leave their towels on the floor, I did not have a problem with that. 

Then I took all the other towels out of the linen closet.

And hid them.

Comments

[Valle]

Ah, you are a genius! And I am so glad to benefit from your brilliant plan and will implement in this household of one teen and one pre-teen boy (I think 'boy' is the key here) who are masters of the 'not-seeing' (or is it 'not caring'?).

A few weeks ago I bought Tim a terry cloth bathrobe to use and it actually cut towel usage by a huge amount, but there's still at least one small towel left on his bed each morning...

[Alesia]

You're a smart cookie! I'm filing this piece of advice away.

[ellen kelley]

I love this post. I have been chuckling all through it! I have two boys, grown and married now, but this sure brought back memories!
I can clearly remember when the oldest first became aware of "the fairer sex". In a twenty four hour period, his showering habits went from a disgruntled acceptance of bathing, to spending what seemed hours in the shower! My husband would turn down the thermostat on the water heater...that effectively cut short an otherwise lengthy shower.
Thanks for a great read.

[Nora Bee]

Very clever indeed. I hope you post a followup on this--I bet your strategy works like a charm!

[(un)relaxeddad]

How am I going to survive all of this!?!?

[Sarah]

This was exactly how my mother handled the towel issue. Lucky for her... it was always Dad's towels that were left on the floor after this sneaky move. Great post!

[KathyR]

That is awesome!

[Mizmell]

Clever indeed. I just hope you found a really good hiding place for those towels.

[niobe]

And then the solution, like Diana from the forehead of Zeus, sprung fully formed from my head.

Uh, actually, it was Athena.

[Anna]

You are absolutely right. And to think I read Edith Hamilton in 9th grade...Mrs. Noling would be so upset with me.

[Never teh Bride]

That is AWESOME! I'm going to tell my dad about this, being that he has waged the same towel war for many years now and there are still four of my siblings at home.