Adult daughter back home for summer … chores?

When our younger daughter, Beatrice, was in grade school, she was known to employ a nifty bit of misdirection. We’d ask her to do a chore — clean her room, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog — and she’d say, “I have homework.”

This stopped us cold. Education is very important in our family. When Beatrice was 3, we placed her — like her older sister before her — on the Conveyor Belt of Knowledge: Montessori school, Smithsonian summer camps, gifted and talented classes, clarinet lessons, magnet programs …

To disrupt this enriching path with something as trivial as a dirty room or a clean dishwasher would have been a tragedy. You’ve got homework? By all means, Beatrice, keep studying.

I guess it worked. Beatrice just graduated from law school.

But the dishwasher still needs emptying. And Beatrice still has homework.

This summer, Beatrice is back, living at home as she studies for the bar exam, the brass ring at the end of the Conveyor Belt of Knowledge, if I may mix my metaphors. She sits around the house watching bar-review lectures on her laptop, taking practice exams in a workbook and drinking horrible smoothies.

All 20-something women in America drink smoothies now, the more disgusting the better. I used to think that smoothies were like milkshakes: sweet and yummy stuff in a blender. A smoothie may have been “better” for you than a milkshake, but only because it had yogurt in it instead of ice cream. Yogurt is healthy, so it makes whatever it touches good for you. (Note to self: Explore bacon-flavored yogurt.)

But apparently the modern smoothie has to be gross, adulterated with kale and chia seeds, protein powder and vermiculite. Beatrice makes one of these every day, and when she’s done, the blender she prepared it in and the glass she drank it from are encrusted with a green glop that dries to an adamantine finish.

“Beatrice, can you please clean out the blender?”

“I’m studying for the bar exam.”

Every parent eventually learns that, as Wordsworth wrote, the child is the father of the man. That basically means that if you didn’t get your kid to clean her room when she was 7, good luck getting her to clean it when she is 24.

But nature is as powerful as nurture, and some people, as Lady Gaga wrote, are just born this way. They inherited the behavioral DNA from one or both parents.

For example, Beatrice has inherited my tendency toward what I call “domestic colonization.” That’s when you plant little bits of yourself throughout the house. Sure, I have a bedroom, an office and a basement — for bed, computer and drum set, respectively — but I also have the sideboard, the sofa and the end table. These, and other places, I colonize with my presence: a slithering stack of magazines; a novel, face down so I don’t lose my place; a lens I’ve just removed from a camera.

With Beatrice home for the summer, my little middens are competing with hers: stacks of handwritten flash cards that read “Negligent infliction of emotional distress” and “When does intestate succession occur?”

That’s why I can’t be too hard on Beatrice. I recognize a bit of myself in her.

My Lovely Wife asks me: “Can you help me take out the recycling?”

“No,” I say. “I have to write my column.”