You Make The Bed You Lie In

Why is it that if you truly hate something, it will harness all its power to make you extra miserable? It happened with that bully in kindergarten and then again with grandma’s brussel sprout syrup. It seems that we are at the mercy of those things that we loath the most. This sad fact recently came to my attention when I was forced into doing the only task I abhor more than peanut butter flavored salmon. I was somehow swindled into making the bed.

Making the bed, like spanking and geometry, is an example of a tradition that serves no purpose except to ruin the lives of children worldwide. While my mother asserts that it makes a room look presentable, I argue that I can achieve the same effect by merely shutting my door. However, this evening, my mother used her motherly mind meld to get me to make the bed before I even realized what I was doing. Not only did she puppeteer me into doing my own, but I somehow ended up making her bed as well. Using her maternal mastermind, she craftily told me to dress the beds with the clean sheets from the dryer. Despite my adamant stance against bed-making, I did not realize until later that by dressing the beds with new sheets, I would eventually produce a beautifully made bed.

When I went to get the sheets from the dryer, I was shocked at the inhumane cruelty of the task at hand. All the sheets were white, but different sizes. In our sweltering 2nd floor I ran back and forth between my parents’ room and my room trying each sheet, each time getting it either on the wrong bed, the wrong orientation, or the dreaded combo pack of both. After loosing a solid twenty pounds from the sprinting, sweating, and wrestling to put a twin sized fitted sheet on a king mattress, I finally got the sheets right. Then it was on to the mountain of pillow cases. When did it ever become ok to have five pillows per person? First you have the large decorative pillow, then the medium one, then the accent pillow, then the soft pillow, then the hard pillow and lying next to those are the exact same set so that the bed looks ‘balanced’. After grappling with the squishiness of the feather cushions, I finally finished stuffing all bazillion of the pillows into their respective cases and tossing them towards the head of the bed. As I looked out at the pristinely neat sheets, folded to perfection and crowned by an organized heap of color coordinated pillows, I stepped back in stunned realization at what I had just done. Exhausted by shame and heavy labor, I hung my head and headed towards my room. I opened the smallest possible corner of the covers and slipped in, not wanting to disturb my immaculately made bed.