I’m pretty surprised that people are jumping on the OP as well. IMO, she’s got every right to vent and every right to expect her daughter to help out without giving her attitude. I don’t know about all of the little side arguments in this thread, but the main idea expressed certainly isn’t all that outrageous.
I suspect there are some side issues bleeding their way into the thread too. My main point is, every request should begin with “please.” Just because you’re paying the bills and feel the other person is subordinate doesn’t give you the right to begin without the “please” part. Once that’s out of the way and you find yourself dealing with laziness and insubordination, by all means switch to “this is not a request.”
I think most parents reserve the right to make demands every now and again. 
We all have our not-so-polite moments, I guess.
I think this is what I’m thinking, too. If my roommate told me, “Hey, go empty the dishwasher,” I’d probably raise an eyebrow at her, but if my mom told me the same thing I’d say, “Okay,” and wouldn’t think twice about it. Or even if I complained, I still wouldn’t think she was being rude.
Maybe it’s a cultural difference. I have thought of my parents as being mean, unreasonable, petty, and demanding on the rare occasion, but I’ve never thought of them as being rude to me. I just can’t see their relationship to me in those terms.
Well see, that’s the cute thing about kids. We teach them stuff and then we never know when they’re going to throw something back at us during that “I’m an adult now” period of their development.
I’m genuinely unsure as to if you’re saying that the daugher is justified in answering rudeness with rudeness or that she was being rebellious the way teens/young adults tend to be.
Is that kind of back talk from an adult offspring an Aussie thing? 'Cos there’s this stereotype about them being a bit rougher around the edges than their fellow Commonwealthers in Britain…
I’m thinking she was taught as a child to say “please” then she went off and became an adult and her mom screwed up the “please” rule and she’s feeling adult-ish and called mom out on it but forgot she isn’t in fact, doing her adult share of the chores. Daughter is not wrong in reminding mom about the “please” rule. though.
Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree because I don’t think a child should ever correct an adult like that, especially her own mother. The kind of mom who would stop and say, “I’m sorry honey, could you please empty the dishwasher?” after just getting snarked at is not the kind of mom I would want to have or be.
Well no offense but many of your threads seem to involve a power struggle of some kind, maybe you just have a dominant personality?
One summer day my little 5 year old neighbor decided that our front yards, with their rolling knolls, was the perfect place to ride her new bike.
Her father hollers down to her, “Megan, stop riding your bike through people’s yards.”
Megan, ever the defiant little imp, says, “NO!”
Her father narrows his eyes and says, “Excuse me, young lady?”
Megan rolls her eyes and screams, “No thank you!”
An adult is NOT a child even if she did spring forth from your loins. Hey, here’s a novel thought: howsabout treating your adult offspring with the same respect you’d treat any other adult? Just because you squeezed her out 18+ years ago doesn’t give you the right to act that way. If another adult behaved the way the OP behaved towards her daughter, you’d be rightfully annoyed. You want respect? Then give it.
Is it at all possible that your daughter wasn’t aware that unloading the dishwasher was her job? I often wonder about moms who say “No one helps around the house!”, but then they never tell you what they want you to do. My mom is the champion of this. And then when you offer to help it’s something “no no, I have to do that, it has to be done a certain way. NO NO, you’re doing it wrong. No no…don’t do that that way.”
The OP would certainly benefit from sitting down with the daughter and making a list of chores, but yeah, if you jump up from the dinner table (since everyone’s making assumptions about what happened) and say “Empty the dishwasher”, that’s rude and it wouldn’t take a SECOND to add “Could you please,” to the beginning of it.
Assuming that you don’t have to be polite to family members is sad. I’m not saying we all have to be formal and Victorian all day, but you catch more flies with honey, you know??
I’m in a similar situation right now… just coming at it from the other side.
Starting when I was thirteen or fourteen, I really was the ONLY one who did any chores in the house – I did all the vacuuming, dusting, tidying, laundry, cooking, and kitchen-cleaning. Not an exaggeration, I promise you. I resented it a bit, mostly because I was Of That Age, but it was fine.
Flash forward. I’m staying with my parents temporarily. My mother (I love her dearly, and yet she’s also the person who would call me ‘slave’ with rather smug relish until the day I moved out, when she said ‘I guess I don’t have a slave anymore’ [I suspect she thought I found this terribly amusing]) was able to order me in the manner she liked to do whatever she wanted until I turned eighteen.
From that point, it’s politely requesting. It’s not a case of supplication, of ‘would madame be so good’. The request ‘Can you empty the dishwasher? I’d appreciate it if you did it more often’ or even ‘I need you to get the kitchen clean by the time I get back’ goes a lot further, with me at least, than ‘Hey. Go clean the kitchen, right now. No, you can’t finish what you’re doing.’
I get the latter from my mother, who remembers what it was like to order me around. I get the former from my father, who still thinks it’s in everyone’s best interests for everyone to treat everyone else with basic respect. With her, I do it but it puts me into a crappy mood. With him, I’m happy to go the extra mile and scrape the chartreuse gel (what WAS that stuff?) out of the back of the fridge.
I think “please” may be taking it a bit far, and a snarky ‘I won’t do it till you say please’ is certainly out there – would you treat a person in the real world that way? – but even though you may be in the right, kam, there’s something else at work here. Your daughter doesn’t want living with you again to mean she’s a little kid. You’re incredibly important in her life, I’m willing to bet, and in her eyes, if you don’t see her as an adult, nobody ever will. If you don’t treat her like an adult, she’s going to think you have determined she’s not worthy of that.
I’m going to assume kambuckta put her request in terms of ‘I need this done’ rather than ‘Do it now, you horrible little peon’. I’m not saying she’s wrong. I’m just saying that along the spectrum of ‘unreasonable requests’, neither cleaning the kitchen nor being polite about demands ranks a mouse’s fart.
Preach it! I got the “No one helps me!” guilt trip a lot and it was almost always followed by “Well what do you want me to do?” which was followed by “Nuthin’.”
I can’t read minds, if you want something to be done, TELL ME.
Seriously. And people are acting like the OP is the evil stepmother to an innocent Cinderella here. There are many shades of grey between saying “Get up off your lazy ass and do the fucking dishes, whore!” and “I’d be very grateful if you could please help with the dishes.” I don’t see how it’s unreasonable for a mother to tell her daughter - who is living with her in order to save money; not visiting - “I need you to help out by doing the dishes.”
But as Indygrrl said, maybe we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I suspect a lot of our disagreement stems from different upbringings/relationships with our parents, but that’s just me.
I think both parents and kids have a tendency to hang onto the adult/child aspect of their relationship long after it was healthy. An adult wouldn’t demand that another adult empty the dishwasher without at least a passing glance at politeness. Petulantly demanding that someone say please is the act of a child mocking a parent’s previous behaviour.
A vaguely related example. I was once home at Christmas and sat in the living room and listened to my mother and two of my aunts discuss how they could guilt trip me into making dinner that night (who knew they discussed these things? I thought guilt tripping was an innate skill in my mother’s family).
When they finally came around to deliver the guilt trip, it wasn’t necessary because, duh, I like to cook. It took a hell of a lot of self-restraint on my part not to fall into my pattern of resisting my mother’s attempts to get me to do things and say no just out of petulance. Had it been something I was less happy to do, like dishes, I probably would have let that whole interaction go to hell in a handbasket–after all, if they wanted to treat me like a teenager, I could certainly still remember what it took to behave like one.
To summarize, both parties in an adult parent / adult child relationship need to act like adults, treat the other person like an adult, and expect to be treated as an adult.
I do wonder how a pit thread would be received if the daughter had asked kambuckta for something without saying please? Then we’d be screaming about the impoliteness and ‘walk all overness’ of kids today. Why isn’t the reverse also true?
I think if the mother were living with the daughter and not contributing, it would be exactly the same as this thread for me.
Saying please in the first place isn’t begging. But someone telling you you have to say please to get your reasonable request accommodated does turn into something akin to begging.
To reiterate: Mom should have said please in the first place. Not doing so is a minor gaffe and shouldn’t be repeated. Daughter shouldn’t have said she had to say please. Doing so is also fairly minor, but quite snotty, and shouldn’t be repeated. Daughter should also have been offering help generally. Not doing so is a major problem.
If I was in the OP’s situation (as the daughter; I’m sure not old enough to have adult children), I would’ve laughed and made a remark about saying “please” even as I went ahead and unloaded the dishwasher. Of course, I probably would’ve already had that done, as well as plenty of other things. While the OP is “guilty” of failing to establish expectations at the outset of the arrangement and of failing to be polite in one particular instance, her daughter behaved like a knuckle-dragger by rudely correcting her mother. Had she done so in an adult manner, this would not be an issue, but instead it would be an opportunity to establish the boundaries of their new relationship as two adults.
As for the various side issues/fights/etc in this thread, I find it difficult to accept manners-related opinions from anybody involved in a snotty snarkfest. And I mean that in the least “fuck you” kind of way, but it does seem like an unproductive side discussion from some folks who already know they don’t like one another, and feel like everyone else needs to know too. A more objective topic really seems like a better place to tear out one another’s throats.