Love means never having to pick up someone else’s moldy apple cores. At least, that’s what I decided after three months of being treated like my stepdaughter’s personal sanitation department.
It started small – a forgotten coffee cup here, a discarded sweater there. But as weeks passed, Kayla’s messes grew bolder. Our guest room became a biohazard zone. Our living room looked like a frat house after finals week. Meanwhile, Kayla floated through the house like a princess, snapping her fingers for pancakes while stepping over piles of her own trash.
The turning point came when I spent my entire Sunday deep-cleaning, only to find her lounging on the couch hours later surrounded by new debris. “Make me pancakes?” she asked, as if I were her short-order cook.
That’s when I went on strike.
No more stealth cleaning. No more enabling. Every piece of trash Kayla dropped became her problem to solve. When passive-aggressive pillow presents didn’t work, I escalated to packing her work lunch with the very garbage she kept leaving around the house.
The shock value worked wonders. Almost overnight, Kayla started cleaning up after herself. She even – gasp! – apologized. We’ll never have one of those storybook stepmother-stepdaughter relationships, but we’ve achieved something better: mutual respect. And these days, that’s enough.
