That's what I had kids for ...

I grew up in the country.  So weekends and summers meant work.  During the summer, my mom would get me and my sister up and into my papa's "garden" shortly after the sun came up each morning.  We would spend the morning picking every variety of corn, pea and bean that the Burpee catalog offered (at least it seemed).  While other kids enjoyed a carefree morning spent watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs, my sister and I would be sweating it out in the fields.  If we dared complain about the grime and the heat, my mother would start telling us about HER childhood summers spent in her dad's cotton fields, and how, despite wearing long sleeved shirts, gloves and long pants, the burrs from the bolls would prick her hands, arms and legs. I learned at a young age that you can't get sympathy from a woman who's worked in a cotton field.  After dinner (lunch for you Yankees), I would always volunteer to stay home and shell peas.  It was much preferable to me to submit to the monotony and raw painful fingers that accompany shelling rather than face another 4 hours in the brutal sun. 


During the school year, Saturdays were chore days.  We had a choice.  One of us could stay inside and clean while the other did yard work.  My sister almost always preferred to mow the "lawn."  Basically, that was any acreage between the house, pond and woods that didn't have to be bush hogged.  As long as she didn't run into any water moccasins slithering up from the pond, she was happy to ride around on the lawn mower in monotonous circles if it meant she could listen to Lionel Richie on her Walkman.  So, I stayed in the house and spent the day vacuuming the floors, polishing the furniture, washing the windows, cleaning the bathrooms, doing laundry and any other task my mother could think of.  One day, I remember asking her why we had to do this much work.  Why didn't she and my dad do the work themselves and let us play?  "Because," she replied, "I don't have to.  That's what I had children for." 

So now, as a mother myself, I look forward to the day that my own kids can take on their fair share of work around the house. And if they dare complain, I know that I will tell them in excruciating detail about my childhood days spent picking in a hot, dusty field.  And at long last,  I will be able to repeat to them my mother's long-resented words.  After all, that's what everyone has kids for, right?