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Marla Jo Fisher

Being a mom is like having an incurable disease. You can’t ever halt the progress of the disease, and you can’t ever go back to not having children, no matter how hard you try.

Symptoms include the inability to remember what you were doing five minutes ago, a Tourette’s-like obsessive repetition of the words “Stop it!” and small cuts on the feet from random Legos that escaped their handlers.

I always listen carefully to advice from people who have no children, because when you’re a frazzled mom, you’re always in need of a good laugh.

“Why don’t you just tell them they’re not allowed to get out the stepladder, climb up on the counter and get into the cookie jar on top of the refrigerator while balanced on one toe?” is a typical query from one of my child-free friends.

“Gee, thanks,” I answer back. “I never thought of that. And, while we’re on the subject of discipline, why don’t you just tell your dog to stop peeing on the leg of my couch?”

At least kids might someday do chores.

Once they’re born, or in my case, adopted, children are part of you for life. This mostly seems fine while they’re little and cute, except when you’re on the phone or in the bathroom and they won’t stop pestering you.

But once they become teenagers, they become like wayward limbs that flail around, refuse to do what you tell them and are just stuck there, only occasionally providing value for the lifeblood you give them.

Anyone who’s ever been a parent knows that it’s often more difficult to get a kid to do a chore than to simply do it yourself.

I used to use this fact against my mother. We’d play a game of chicken. She’d order me to do my chore, and I’d resist and she’d order me and I’d resist. Usually, she couldn’t stand the stress anymore and would simply do the work herself.

I remember those days, and it’s made me stubbornly refuse to play that same game with my kids.

I’ve sent my son back five or six times to redo a task that he flubbed up, like cleaning the bathroom. I consistently point out to him that the objective of cleaning the bathroom is that afterward it should actually be tidy and germ-free, and not merely have the dirt moved around to different locations.

“The point of wiping down the counters is to remove random bits of soap scum and toothpaste. It’s not an end to itself,” I have explained to him 800 or 900 times. “If the gunk isn’t gone, you haven’t done the chore.”

Amazingly, now that he’s 18 and soon to move out, he seems to have mastered the art of bathroom cleaning, after only five years of instruction.

Mother’s Day was a little hard for me this year, because my mom died last May 23. My kids tried to make it more special for me as a result, forcing me to leave the house so Cheetah Boy could decorate it.

His decorations consisted mostly of spreading rose petals around that I suspect were probably swiped from the neighbor’s rose bushes. And the kids wrote me heartfelt letters that any mom knows are more precious than most gifts. Other than diamonds or new cars, of course.

Amazingly, when I asked him to sweep up the now-dead rose petals yesterday, he did it without complaining.

I might be stuck with my kids like a disease, but it doesn’t take a Mother’s Day for me to know that I’m grateful every day to be infected.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7994 or mfisher@ocregister.com