Less Clothing, More Mud.

That could be the motto of every teenage boy.

Forget school dress codes. Moms of teenage boys everywhere know that it is a good beginning to the day if he arrives at school with all the important parts covered in something clean.

Back when I was a teenage girl and all the popular boys arrived at school looking rumpled like they didn’t care about their appearance, we just assumed it was casual cool; you know, defiant unconcern.

Now I know that minutes before they were supposed to leave for school they were frantically scrambling through the dirty clothes hamper. Their moms were in the background shouting, “But I washed three loads yesterday!”

Which brings me to the mantra of moms of teenage boys everywhere, “What happened to the washed and neatly folded pile I put on your bed this morning?”

One wise friend suggested I give up and just place a laundry basket of clean clothes in his armoire every few days, thus avoiding the frustration of seeing the pile unfolded and stashed under his bed. Apparently, in the minds of teenage boys, under the bed is the logical place to store clean clothes.

Okay, my wise friend is actually my sonin law and he has some experience with being a teenage boy and hanging out with other teenage boys. He turned out superduper, in spite of whatever challenges his mother faced, bless her, so I find his thoughts very encouraging.

The laundry basket plan was a pretty effective strategy until I realized that the armoire was starting to smell like teenage boy.

“Why don’t you just let him do his own laundry?” suggested my husband helpfully one morning after a particularly close call getting off to school.

Bless his heart.

Thus proving that grown men have no recollection at all of how hard their own mothers worked to keep clean clothes on their teenage backs.

All of which makes me want to be particularly kind to my mom-in-law.

Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are invited at http://checklistcharlie. blogspot.com.