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I am writing this column in praise of Girl Scout cookies.

This is not just because we are quickly coming up on the one hundredth anniversary of Girl Scouting (mark your calendars: March 12, 2012!). And it is not just because the Girl Scouts are one of the most inclusive, accepting, and character-building organizations out there. (Unlike other, similar organizations, the Girl Scouts don’t judge a girl because of her sexuality or religion—or even her lack of religion. In fact, in earlier days they were among the first to stop judging girls based on race; no less a person than Martin Luther King, Jr. himself described the Girl Scouts as a “force for desegregation.”) And, believe it or not, it’s not because the Girl Scouts have recently come under attack from the nut jobs in the Christian Right, who interpret their policy of teaching girls “honesty, fairness, courage, compassion, character, sisterhood, and confidence” as just another sneaky way to turn girls into feminists. (Although, if you believe the Christian Right’s definition of feminism—the radical notion that women are equal to men—then I guess they’re right: the Girl Scouts are pushing a “feminist” agenda. And I couldn’t be happier.) And, finally, it’s not even because my Great Aunt Lu, one of the strongest, most determined women I ever knew, considered herself to be a Girl Scout from the time she joined in the early 1920s to the moment she died a few years back.

No, the real reason I am writing this column in support of Girl Scout cookies is because I really, really, loves me some Samoas. (Sure, I love Thin Mints, too. And Tagalongs, Do-Si-Dos, and yes, even Trefoils—but my first love will always be the Samoa.) And it’s the actual loving part of Girl Scout cookies that is the most important to me, because, unlike all of the other products I have ever been asked to help sell to raise funds for my children’s activities, (popcorn, wrapping paper, mexican dinners, wrapping paper, frozen cookie dough, wrapping paper, magazines, wrapping paper, calendars, wrapping paper), Girl scout cookies have been, by far, the easiest to sell. Believe me: no one has ever come knocking at my door at ten o’clock at night looking to place a last minute subscription for Marie Claire. I have had that experience, however, with Thin Mints.

There has also never been a fund-raising event that has even come close to Girl Scout cookies when it comes to organization and efficiency, which is an incredible bonus. The Girl Scout cookie selling machine—there’s no other way to describe it—is such a well-oiled one that I have no doubt that when the time finally comes to have our first female president, she will be a proud former Girl Scout.

Of course, it hasn’t always been that easy: my Great Aunt Lu used to tell me that when she was a young Girl Scout there were no boxed cookies—the expectation was that after you took the orders you (or more likely, your mother) would then have to bake them. “But what if your mother was a terrible baker?” I asked her. “Well, then,” she said, “you didn’t sell many cookies.”

Fortunately, however (for all of us Samoa lovers), this is no longer the case. So while there’s still a few weeks left in cookie season, do the Girl Scouts (and yourself) a favor, and make a commitment to buy a box the next time you see that table set up outside the grocery store. (And don’t give me any of this “gluten free” or “low carb” crap—you do know that you can buy a box from the Girl Scouts and ask them to donate it to a worthy cause for you, right? That’s what I thought.)

I’m sure the future Madame President will thank you.

Once upon a time, back when the Forest Service was relatively new, they didn’t hire official fire crews every summer; instead, they would wait until a fire broke out and then hire local people to fight local forest fires. In theory, this was a great idea: the locals were already there, they were motivated to save the forest, and they were very familiar with the area. In practice, though, it was a terrible idea: it led to many, many intentionally caused fires, as unemployed locals soon figured out that the surest way to get a summer job was to set their own forest on fire.

This little tidbit of information was the first thing that came to my mind the other day when I was asked the question: “How much will you pay me to clean my bathroom?”

Immediately I had visions of tubs left unattended to intentionally overflow, towels wadded up and thrown into the corner to purposefully mildew, and toilets drenched with less than stellar aim. In other words, I pictured forest fires being set so that they could be put out for money.

I know that’s not the case, of course: I know that, unlike those unemployed locals, my children are perfectly willing to trash their bathroom with no recompense whatsoever, but still, I’d have to be crazy if I added any more incentive for them to make a pigsty out of the place beyond their own love of filth.

Some parents, I know, feel differently. Some parents think that paying their kids to do “chores” around the house teaches the kids the value of hard work and the joy of earning something with their own labor. (I always snicker at the word “chore.” Where I grew up, this was a term that was applied to milking the goats and mucking out stalls—not unloading the dishwasher.) And, I have to admit, there is some merit in what they say: the only way to truly learn how to balance your finances is to handle—and mishandle—money. Nothing teaches you the value of a dollar like being swindled out of that dollar—especially when (or perhaps only when) you had to earn that dollar yourself. The same goes for buying something you really want with money you had to work hard to earn: there’s no better way to learn how to take care of your stuff than being the one who has to replace it. (It’s amazing how few backpacks get lost in college, as opposed to high school.) So, yeah, I can see the point in paying for chores. However, I have one little problem with this scheme: I can’t fire my kids.

Sure, I can tell them they did a crappy job, and that I’m not going to pay them, but I can’t actually make them put their lolcat day calendars into a file box and then have security escort them out while they do the walk of shame past the other children. (Not that I haven’t dreamt about it sometimes.) No, after I “fire” these particular employees, I’m still stuck living in the office with them—and who wants to live with a disgruntled former employee? Have all of those “Caught in the Act” YouTube videos taught us nothing? The people in those videos only have eight hours a day to put their special little “additives” into the coffeepot: my kids can wreak havoc on this “office” 24/7. (And frequently do, even without the added spite incentive.)

And so, between my children and I, we have come to an agreement quite different than the “paying for chores” model: they do nothing, and I pay them nothing. Or, to continue the Forest Service analogy: I decided to just let it burn.

There are two ways we could go about this. One is as follows.

Public Announcement 6735: On April 1, 2012, at 11 am (MST) there will be a meeting in the living room of the Wilson/Ellis house for the purpose of removing dirty dishes from the coffee table. Until such time occurs, and until the aforementioned coffee table is cleared, no one may place any object (dish or otherwise) on the surface of said coffee table. This includes such non-dish items as feet, PS3 controllers, and pickles which have been mined from the depths of fast food hamburgers and are still wet with ketchup. This edict also applies to the area immediately surrounding the coffee table to a distance of six inches in all directions. When the coffee table has been sufficiently cleared (as judged by the coffee table owner), there will be a signal (agreed upon previously) and objects (including dirty dishes) may once again be placed on the surface of and in the area immediately surrounding the coffee table, until such time as the next official coffee table clearing event is announced. (This announcement has been made pursuant to Wilson/Ellis Revised statutes 154-L, otherwise known as the “But I cleaned up my mess” rule.)

Public Announcement 6736: On April 1, 2012, from approximately 1:00 p. (MST) to 2:00 pm (MST), there will be a gathering in the kitchen of the Wilson/Ellis kitchen to wash the dishes which have been removed from the Wilson/Ellis coffee table. There will be twenty slots of three minutes each available for the washing of the dishes: please register for these slots no later than midnight, March 31, 2012. (This announcement has been made pursuant to Wilson/Ellis revised statutes 154-M, otherwise known as the “But that’s not my cup” rule.)

Or you could just stop arguing about who made what mess, and clear off the coffee table like I asked you to in the first place.

Why is it that the same kid who can come home with somebody else’s backpack every other day can tell you, with one hundred percent certainty, down to the tiniest molecule, exactly which part of a particular mess they are responsible for? (And only clean up “their” portion of said mess accordingly?) Point to a series of muddy footprints on the floor and they will exclaim, with complete conviction, that while they might have made that and that footprint, they certainly didn’t make that, that, and that one. Or, more likely, that even though they were among the ten people with muddy feet who just walked through the kitchen, somehow they alone were the one whose feet left no trail—which is why they shouldn’t be held responsible for having to clean it up. (If that were possible I would never let a kid like that out of my sight: you never know when you might need some loaves and fishes, let alone a new jug of wine.)

Sometimes I get the feeling that if my house were to explode, and we were required to pick up the bits of pieces of it that were strewn all over Flagstaff, my kids would carefully scour the entire town picking up only those items they were sure belonged to them and them alone. Never mind the fact that one of “their” pieces might be lying under another piece; never mind the fact that they were already bending over; somehow, in their minds, they have become convinced that people are responsible for picking up their messes, and their messes alone.

“But why should I have to clean up someone else’s mess?” is the argument they always make.

At that point I am always tempted to throw down the mop and march out the door, asking, as I go, “Why indeed?” Sigh. One day.

One day.

It was a typical scenario: me, staring aghast at the ruin that once was my kitchen, and my daughter, Clementine, (brought unwillingly back to the scene of the crime), looking at the same scene and yet seeing nothing wrong. Finally, after listening to me explain how it could be possible that the same foodstuff was not a mess when it was in its original container, yet was a mess when it was on the floor, she spoke up. “I don’t know what you’re making such a big deal about,” she said, her eyes searching the ceiling, perhaps for the otherworldly source of my clearly unjustified displeasure. “It’s only a little mess.”

I turned around to debate her, but she was already gone. And really, what would I have said, anyway? How would I have convinced her that the same mess could be “little” in her view, and “large” in mine? There are some messes, of course, that loom large in everyone’s opinion: Katrina. Prince William Sound. That time you thought the lid was on the blender. Then there are the ones that exist in a more shadowy grey area. I might think your wallet is a “mess” because the pictures aren’t in chronological order, but that’s okay: it’s not my mess. (Although, if you leave your wallet on the bar while you go to the bathroom, I might just rearrange the photos for you. And snicker at your old college ID photo—what a magnificent mullet!).

Really, though, what I think it comes down to is this: there are big messes, there are little messes, and then, in a category all their own, there are other peoples’ messes. And when it comes to having to clean any of those messes up, the largest, by far, will always be the third category: other peoples’ messes.

It doesn’t matter how “small” the mess allegedly is: if you didn’t make it, and yet are the one stuck with cleaning it, it will always be too large. That’s what I had tried—and failed—to get across to Clementine while I was cleaning up the hot sauce she had spilled on the box of cassette tapes I keep stored under a cabinet in my kitchen. (No, I don’t currently own a cassette player. No, I don’t have plans to buy one anytime in the near future. And no, I don’t think it’s time to throw my cassette tapes away: long live the 80s.) It didn’t matter that it was “only” half a bottle. It didn’t matter that “no one ever looked down there, anyway.” What mattered was that it wasn’t my mess, and yet, once again, I was the one stuck with cleaning it up.

Or rather, re-cleaning it up, since she had, supposedly, “cleaned it all up” herself already. Never mind the fact that there was still hot sauce on the front of Mark Knopfler’s guitar. And across Bruce Hornsby’s face. And I’m not even going to mention where it was spilled on Bruce Springsteen. But still, that wasn’t the point (although I bet Bruce will never sing “I’m on Fire” quite the same way again).

The point was that there is just something so immensely wearying about cleaning up a mess that doesn’t belong to you. Of course, sometimes it can be immensely satisfying, too. I think the difference is in whether or not you actually get a chance to volunteer for the position, and what sort of recognition is involved.

Maybe that’s the answer: all I really need is to print up some “This section of floor adopted by Kelly Poe Wilson” stickers, and then, like the volunteers who pick up the trucker bombs along our nation’s highways, I will feel both needed and appreciated.

I think a couple of hundred should do for a start.

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”–James Thurber

Nobody ever talks about about the time everything went right. Well, some people do: some people are more than happy to talk about the time they won an all-expenses paid trip to Paris, and how it was the most incredible trip, perfect in every way. Of course, these people are also usually blissfully unaware that halfway through their story their audience has either stopped listening entirely or begun to plot how best to stuff them in a sack and throw them over the side of a cliff.

But this kind of person, thankfully, seems to be mercifully rare. Much more common is the person who tells a story about the time everything went wrong—and not just because it is more common for everything to go wrong (it really isn’t you know), but because people instinctively realize the truth in what James Thurber said: adversity is funny.

Or at least it’s funny in retrospect.

I tried to keep that in mind the other day when the doctor gave me the news that Clementine had chicken pox. My first thought upon hearing this particular piece of joy was the story my mom still tells about the time me and my sister came down with chicken pox one right after the other, meaning that while we only suffered two weeks apiece, she ended up confined to the house for over a month. Oh, how I used to chuckle (at least inwardly) when she would tell that story, so amused by the haunted look in her eyes as she recalled being trapped in a house in the suburbs with two cranky children for a solid month. It was funny, you see, because it happened a long time ago—to someone else. Suddenly, however, the humor of the story was not quite so apparent. Or rather, it was not quite so accessible to me anymore.

There have been times, of course, when even as something awful has been happening I realized that it would make a funny story later. One of my most treasured possessions from my early 20s is the picture I took of a friend of mine seconds after she ran into a tree while sledding. As I ran down the hill toward her, camera in hand, I remember thinking, “Once she stops bleeding this is going to make a really funny story.” That was the thought that was foremost in my mind as I snapped the picture that day. And yeah, it is a funny story, now—not only because she turned out to be okay, but because I have a picture of a bunch of people glaring at the camera in disgust while my friend presses snow to her face in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Trust me: it’s a funny picture. Now.

Which is how I know that one day the chicken pox story will be funny, too. One day it will be funny that Clementine had to miss a week of high school right before finals. One day it will be funny that she walked around the house with a sheet over her head like an extra in Paranormal Activity 17 because she didn’t want anyone to see her face. One day it will be funny to all the boys in the house that, since the rule is the sick person gets to pick what to watch, for a solid week not one single zombie died on our TV screen, but rather a whole lot of spunky heroines finally got the guy. (Actually, that was funny at the time—for me.)

Heck, one day it will be even be funny that while she was sleeping I lifted up the sheet and took a picture of her spots. Well, okay, at least it will be funny to me.

And really, isn’t that the whole point?

I have never been a fan of “mom” purses, if for no other reason than the fact that they seem to become the catch-all for the rest of the family’s possessions. I have been to sledding hills where I watched mothers pull entire winter wardrobes out of their gigantic purses while their children—looking like they had just stepped out of a Land’s End catalog—stood there with no bags at all, free to enjoy an unencumbered day of fun in the snow. In fact, some of those mom bags were so commodious that it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to see them pull out hot chocolate, marshmallows, and a blazing fire while they were at it.

I, however, am not one of those moms; I don’t even like to carry other people’s sunglasses, let alone all of their worldly possessions. Unfortunately, however, if you’re a mom, and you have a bag, eventually your kids are going to ask you to put something in it. It is inevitable. Which is why a few years back I decided that the only way to get out of the Mom Bag business was to stop carrying a bag entirely. Which I did, and from that moment on I have carried everything I needed in my pockets—just like a guy.

This, of course, meant that everyone else had to start carrying the stuff they needed in their own pockets: no more would me and my bag be the repository for sunglasses, keys, books, gloves, and handheld entertainment devices. From now on (I said) we would all be responsible for our own stuff. That was the theory, at least.

In actuality, what this meant was that everyone was now irresponsible for their own stuff, because as soon as I stopped carrying it for them, things began to get lost. I partly blame the fashion industry for this: exactly when did they start making pants without pockets, or at least without pockets big enough to hold anything other than a fifty cent piece? I mean, some of these pockets aren’t even big enough to hold a credit card, and I don’t know anyone who travels that light. But still, just because you are unlucky enough to be wearing pocket-less pants, that doesn’t mean you have to lose all of your possessions. You could put them in a coat pocket. Or, if your coat is also pocketless (I’ve seen that, too), you could carry your things in your own small bag. Perhaps a grocery bag. Or even a baggie. Or, if you are my children, you could walk around with all of your important possessions in your hands, like someone who has just escaped from a house fire and is still a little confused from inhaling all of that smoke. And, like that confused fire refugee, you could set those possessions down somewhere one at a time, and then walk away, never to see them again.

Not that it is really that much better when they do carry a bag—that just means that they get to lose all of their stuff in one place, as opposed to several. But still, the bag (or more likely, backpack) at least allows me experience brief moments of serenity. “Where’s your homework?” I’ll ask. “Backpack.” Good. “ Cellphone?” “Backpack.” Nice. “House keys?” “Backpack.” Excellent. And then I make the mistake of asking “And where is your backpack?’ and get “I dunno,” in return, and my serenity all falls away.

There’s got to be a compromise between being the person who carries everyone’s stuff in a monstrous bag, and being the person who has to help look for an endless stream of lost objects. Unfortunately, I think I already know what that compromise is: bigger pockets. But just for me, alas.

Just for me.

I have always been an advocate of the belief that both people and children have not changed one bit during the last few Millennium. (No, they’re not the same thing at all.) I believe that cave children had just as many excuses for not putting away their rocks and bones as children today have for leaving their game controllers and iPods lying all over the living room floor (“That’s not my rock/game. No, I don’t know who it belongs to. Wait! Don’t throw it away! It might belong to someone and they probably want it back; why don’t you just give it to me?”)

I also believe that children have confounded their parents with their choices in clothes, hair, and music since the dawn of time. (Remember, the waltz was once considered scandalous.) And I believe that each successive generation conveniently forgets all of this when the time comes for them to have kids of their own, thereby guaranteeing a long, non-broken lineage of the familiar lament, “I don’t know what the problem is with kids these days.” Still, even believing all of that, I must admit that there has been a habit I have noticed lately among children—my own and others—that I can honestly say strikes me as an entirely new phenomenon, something that, as far as I can tell, is strictly limited to the generation currently wearing the “kids these days” crown. This habit to which I am referring is the one where they refuse to turn their homework assignments in.

I’m not talking about not doing their assignments. Oh, there’s plenty of that going around, too, but that’s nothing new. And I’m not talking about saying they did an assignment when they really didn’t. (The old “dog/sabertooth tiger ate my homework” dodge has been around forever.) No, what I’m talking about is when they take the time, either through their own initiative or our incessant nagging, to actually DO an assignment, and then fail to turn it in.

And not because they forgot it on their desk (or on the bus, in the car, under the porch, up in the treehouse, etc.), but because they just don’t ever hand it in. It might be in their backpacks, at their very fingertips, when the teacher asks for assignments, and yet there it remains, for weeks and weeks, until finally they decide it has reached some kind of secret “expiration date” (“It’s too late to turn this in now”) and they throw it away.

I have conducted an informal poll among all of the parents I know, and no matter what kind of a kid they were themselves (control freak, space cadet, uber-nerd, stoner, sullen outcast) they all agree that this was something they never, ever, did. And they all lament the fact that they each have at least one child at home who does this very thing. It is maddening. And confounding.

Why do they do it? (Or rather, why do they not do it?) Could it be because they were born into a world with Wikipedia and Twitter, and are already presupposing a Brave New World where actually physically turning in assignments will be archaic: instead the homework will instantly be beamed from the student’s mind into the teacher’s head? Are they already anticipating the time when they will roll their eyes at us for ever needing to print out and hand in assignments, the same way they now roll their eyes at us when we insist on carrying an actual paper map in the glovebox?

Maybe, unlike us, they can already imagine a time when absolutely everything is stored in “the cloud.” Or maybe, just like a thousand generations before them, they are simply coming up with newer and better ways to annoy us. Yeah: that sounds a lot more likely to me, too.

Recently, a young friend of mine made his first entry into the world of full time work. This was the beginning of many painful realizations for him, including smaller than expected paychecks, brutally early mornings (to a teenager, anything before ten is inhumane), and mentally unstable bosses. It was the last part of the equation that we talked about the most, though, because while paychecks grow (hopefully) and internal clocks can be reset, the reality of the awful boss is something that has to be endured in one form or another for the rest of your life. This prompted a discussion between us as to the different types of terrible bosses, and whether it is worse to have a boss who is unreasonable, unstable, demanding and needy all of the time, or to have one who can turn on the charm just long enough each day to keep you coming back for more, but who is, at their core, just as unreasonable, unstable, demanding and needy as the rest of them.

I was of the opinion that a partially charming boss was better, but that in the end it really didn’t matter: you still needed to treat even the best boss with the caution with which you would treat a pre-menstrual girlfriend, and always be ready to duck those plates that got unexpectedly thrown at the back of your head. (In both cases, the plates in question hopefully being of the verbal sort.) He was of the opinion that they were both equally bad.

We never did reach a conclusion—I said that he was too sensitive, and he said that I had been beaten into obedient acceptance by age—but later, when I was relating the whole conversation to my husband, he pointed out that I had failed to warn my friend about the most demanding, most unreasonable, and clearly the neediest boss of all time: the infant.

“Don’t you remember?” he said. “It was nonstop: Ms. Wilson, can you come in here? I’ve soiled myself, followed by, Oh dear, I seem to have done it again—I guess I wasn’t finished after all. And even worse, There’s something I want; I don’t know what it is, but I know that I want it RIGHT NOW!”

It was true: I had forgotten how terrible it was to have an infant boss. Maybe that was why I could be so sanguine about bosses in general. It wasn’t, like I had asserted, that with age and experience I had gained enough perspective to know that even the worst boss is only temporary, or even as my young friend had asserted, that I was just old and beaten down, but rather a case of having been through the very worst boss ever, and, having come through it in (relatively) one piece, having a better take on the whole boss thing in general.

I’ve heard that Bill Gates has said that no matter how bad your worst high school teacher was, your first boss will be worse; not only do I think that he is correct in this assessment, but I think he needs to add the corollary “and no matter how bad your first boss is, your first child will be even worse than that.”

Maybe it’s just a matter of desensitizing ourselves to the pain—although, like the frog who doesn’t notice that the warm pot he’s sitting in is boiling until it’s too late—that particular desensitization might not necessarily be a good thing. Or it might be the best thing that ever happened to us. Who knows? Maybe there’s an evolutionary reason for the whole thing: maybe infants teach us to put up with abuse because when we have an infant is when we most need to keep our jobs.

Or maybe I’m just saying that because I’m old and beaten down.
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There was a time in my life when I was very tolerant of cleaning up after others. I’m not just talking about before my kids were potty trained and I had to do things like change a diaper on a commuter train bathroom floor (the horror, the horror), but also back before my kids were born, when I had roommates who didn’t see the point of staggering all the way to the bathroom to puke—not every time, at least. But not anymore. Maybe it has something to do with age, or maybe it’s the fact that as the mom, the messes always seem to trickle down to me (literally), but as time has passed I have become less and less tolerant about cleaning up the messes of others. This is true for any mess, of course, but the messes I am particularly adverse to cleaning up lately are the ones involving bodily parts and/or bodily fluids.

Hey, drink all you want (is my motto)—just don’t come to my house when it’s time to puke. By the the same token, I’m glad that you have finally decided to attend to some personal hygiene issues; however, that doesn’t mean I want to find your fingernail clippings on my kitchen counter. And I shouldn’t even have to mention that the only place I want to find your urine (or for that matter, my own) is inside a toilet.

That’s not being unreasonable, is it? All I ask is that when you come to my house you keep your parts and your fluids to yourself. And if you can’t, well, then maybe you should’ve stayed out in the forest where you belong.

That’s right, I said forest. Because the “other” that I’m talking about here, and the one whose messes really get on my nerves lately, is none other than my yearly nemesis: the Christmas Tree.

You think your Uncle Bubba is bad with the way he chews off his fingernails and spits them on the floor? He’s nothing compared to a Christmas tree dropping its needles. At least Uncle Bubba only has ten fingers (well, nine actually—people named Bubba always seem to be missing one or two)—a Christmas tree has dozens of limbs. And when Uncle Bubba has a few too many PBRs and lets go, at least he was trying to make it to the bathroom. Or the back door. Or the kitchen sink. A Christmas tree will gleefully drop sap on the floor from the front door all the way to the spot you finally wedge it into.

And “wedge” really is the operative word here. Most people I know don’t live in houses that are big enough to contain a bit of shrubbery year round, which means the Christmas tree must occupy a spot that was formerly being used for something else—like the couch. Or a hall. This means that it is always in the way. Sure, Uncle Bubba gets in your way, too: but at least he will attempt to move when you are trying to carry in an armload of firewood—a Christmas tree will just stand there like an inanimate object.

I know, I know: supposedly, a Christmas tree is an inanimate object. The thing is, I have my doubts about that. There have been plenty of times when I have placed our tree securely in the stand, watered it for the night, and then went to bed, only to find it sprawled out on the living room floor come morning. It’s not in the forest anymore, so it’s not like the wind knocked it over.

This, of course, begs the question: “If the Christmas tree falls in the living room, and nobody’s there to see it, who has to clean it up?”

Never mind. I think I know the answer to that question already.

In my family, we speak in movie quotes a lot. Other people might not understand, but my husband knows exactly what I mean when we go to an over-the-top birthday party and I say, “It’s all for you, Damian. All for you.” Just like I know what he means when someone wishes us a Merry Christmas and he says, “And a Happy New Year to you . . . in jail!” Sometimes our quotes don’t even make sense—we just like the way they sound. Which is why even in Flagstaff we will sometimes turn to one another and say, “I’ll meet you at the monorail!” (Don’t worry if you don’t recognize that one. The only reason it has any meaning to us is that we were both at the exact same state of sleep deprivation one afternoon when Clementine was a sleepless infant, and Storm said that line to the other X-Men. I guess you had to be there.)

At one time I was afraid that this part of our relationship was going to end—after all, I can probably count on one hand the number of times my husband and I have been able to watch a movie together since our kids were born. But then came the miracle of Netflix, and even though we still almost never get a chance to watch a movie together, we can still, given enough time, manage to watch the same movie in the same month. Which is how we discovered our new favorite line.

It’s from the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman movie “Seven.” (Yeah, I know—I’m about a decade behind). Anyway, the line from “Seven” that we find ourselves using lately is “What’s in the box?” (For those of you who are also a decade behind, I won’t ruin it for you by telling you “what’s in the box,” but I will tell you this: it’s nasty.)

It’s not so much the line—the words themselves are fairly innocuous—but the way Brad Pitt delivers it. “What’s in the box?” he says in this pathetic, dread-filled whine, in a way that lets you know that he knows exactly “what’s in the box.” That’s the way my husband and I say it to each other when we have to undertake some potentially unpleasant task like cleaning out a school backpack that has just been “discovered” under the bed at the end of the summer, or going through the pockets of a pair of pants that have made it all the way through the washer and dryer with their load of leftover Halloween candy (semi) intact.

Or lately, it’s what we’ll say to each other when one of us has to go into Clementine’s room to collect the dishes. (This happens about once every two weeks—we usually wait until we are down to such a small number of spoons that people have begun to carry them around with them at all times, like they do in concentration camps.) Anyway, one of us will go in while the second will stay just outside the door, ready to render assistance if needed. (We’d like to use the fire department’s policy of two in/two out, but we’ve never been able to find another two people willing to do it with us.)

Almost always, at some point during the dish rescue operation, the “inside” parent will gasp in horror (we’ve learned not to scream—best not to wake the inhabitants). This is the cue for the other parent to ask, in their best Brad Pitt whine, “What’s in the box?”

This does two things: one, it lets the inside parent know that the outside parent is “with” them—in spirit, if not in body. And two: it allows us to make a joke about the situation. Which, in my house, is even more vital than spoons.