Let’s talk about THE Teenager’s ROOM.

 I’ll try to keep this post short, and focused on one characteristic. 

You know you have a teenager in the house when …

…you open the door to their room and are bombarded by…THE SMELL. 

  I would post a picture of this (THE SMELL), but at my last check, there is no “scratch and sniff” technology available for computers. (Now there’s a useful science fair project!)  All three rooms belonging to the under- 20-crowd in my house have a distinctive odor.  One of them (the smell in the room) is actually pleasant.  I open the door to my middle teen’s room and the lovely smell of perfume wafts towards me.  In fact, I don’t even need to put my perfume on anymore cause I can just walk in said room and be well-covered for at least the next 8 hours!  (I’m just kidding on that.)

      Then there are the less pleasant smells that for the life of me, I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is.  I open one of the other doors and a strange combination of boy-sweat, hormones, dirty laundry, stale crackers, and such (I say that because I have no idea what this “such” is) all combine with the fact that the door is rarely opened to produce a most distinctive odor. 

     Thankfully, all teens  keep their doors shut so the problem is well contained.  I am not sure, but I think another contributing factor to THE SMELL is that teenage attitudes (particularly the negative kind) must give off some reactive scent—by itself, it is not detectable to the human olfactory system—but when combined with other things (sweat, dirty laundry, etc.), it becomes that unnameable, unpinpointable flavor that completes the teenage-room funky smell.  So, that’s more than you wanted to know, but it is one way to know that you have teenagers in the house.  Gone are the days when baby powder scented the room.  But, the upside is, gone are the baby days, when more often than not, the endless poopy diaper was the odor of the season.

     Now in regard to THE SMELL, I will give them one, small thing: 

     We do live in Okinawa, which is very humid, so lots of things have a smell. 

      Just so you know, after writing this post, I was rummaging in my purse to find my car keys.  Guess what I discovered?  An old cheese stick.  Thankfully it was still in the wrapper, or my purse would have THE SMELL too.  (And I would have been carting that around for a month. ) Just keepin’ it real here. 

     Just when I start to get on a roll about THE SMELL, I remember that all too soon, the odor will change.  In a few years,  the first thing I will smell when I open their doors will not be that “I-hate-to-clean-up-my-room”smell .  Instead, the uninhabited, they-don’t-live-in-here-anymore smell will be what I experience when I walk in their rooms.

     So what’s the moral of this story?  Enjoy my teenagers and get air freshener for THE SMELL! 

By the way, I’ll be deducting the cost of air freshener from their allowance! 

When I think about it, I am pretty sure that air freshening, de-odorizing products were first conceived of by moms.