It was three years ago, the day after my 22nd birthday. I’d just come home from work, and I was exhausted. Numb.
I opened the door to my room expecting to see the usual sight: bags of trash piled up in the corner, and more littered throughout the room. Empty take-out containers, stuff like that. A lot of dirty laundry. A bed with sheets unchanged for… God knows how long.
I didn’t care- in fact, as I was in the middle of such a bad depressive spell, I didn’t really even think about it. All I wanted to do was sleep. My phone was blinking from dozens of unread texts and missed phone calls, but that was normal. I was too mentally drained to even bother reading them.
So, imagine my shock when I opened the door to a room so clean that the floorboards gleamed.
No more trash. My laundry was clean, and folded in neat piles on top of a pristinely made bed. Even my piano was dusted and shined. The air in the room smelt lightly of perfume, which I recognized as my mother’s, as opposed to stale cigarette smoke and old fryer grease.
Stunned, I checked the rest of the apartment. My roommate’s room was the same as always, but the kitchen, toilet, and bathroom were all so clean I almost didn’t recognize my own apartment.
I opened my phone and finally checked my messages. My mother had texted me:
Call me when you get home tonight. I love you.
I called. My mom put me on speaker-phone. She, my dad, and two younger sisters were bursting with glee as they screamed, “Happy Birthday!!”
They explained that my dad had come over a week before, while I was at work, to drop something off. He told me that he’d cried when he’d seen the state of my room, and had immediately called an emergency family meeting.
“We know how you get when you’re depressed, babe,” said one of my sisters, “so we spent the day cleaning everything. We decided this would be a joint birthday present from us. We love you.”
Credit to Amanda (Quora)
