Tangled Up

I remember being a small child, around the ages of 9 or 10, and being instructed to straighten up my room and make my bed. This was an early Saturday morning, and I was in the prime of my youth, hardly willing to sacrifice the precious hour it would take-due to my excessive whining and elongation of the event-for me to do the task. Yet I'd do it. It would turn into a struggle, a battle fought on two fronts. I'd return the action figures that, somehow, had emerged from the darkness of my closet to their respective crate. The video games would be returned to their draw after the previous night of use. I'd take out any cups or bottles and take them to the kitchen, where I'd rinse them out and put them in the plastic bag we had hanging from the cabinet door for recyclables, fighting the temptation to make a mess, the temptation to fill up the sink and pretend the bottle or can was a submarine seeking out enemy ships.
I remember dusting the television and furniture, using Windex on the glass and Pledge on the wood, making sure everything was clean and dust-free. I would usually slip later from some of the Pledge getting on the floor, resulting in a terrific fall and a beautifully bruised hip. I remember taking dirty laundry (socks, shirts, and other articles of clothing) from the spot by the door where I always threw them to the laundry basket by the side door. There they would temporarily reside until my mother would take them down to the laundry room, where she manipulated that crazy machine to do her bidding, resulting in the clothes coming out nice and fresh in a matter of hours. This was all done first, to avoid the final task, the one I dreaded each and every week-making my bed.
I've always received good grades, and I've always had a great aptitude for learning and applying skills. Yet, for whatever reason, I could never make my bed correctly! There would always be some wrinkle in my work, maybe the blanket was crooked. There would always be something wrong. Most of these frustrations came from the sheets

"Not like that!" my mother would say. In a second, she'd sweep in, have the comforter off, observe how I sloppily tucked in the sheets, pull them out, and perform a motion I could never perfect-hospital corners. What resulted was a thing of beauty. No wrinkles in the sheets, nothing sticking out sloppily. It was beautiful I tell you. It was a work just as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the Sistine Chapel or Mozart's Requiem. It was a masterpiece and I just could not do it. I'd practice and practice and never get it not even once.* Try as I might, I was never able to perfect that motion. Each week I'd make my bed and each week it would be just as sloppy as the week before. I'd try to learn, and I'd watch my mother make her own bed. It was an art that required precision and consistency. Usually I possessed these traits. In this case, I did not.

The years went by and I was never able to learn the motion or the technique. After my failure to put on the sheets correctly, I'd follow it up by putting on the blanket sloppily, and then putting on the pillows even more so. It was a battle I could never win. As a perfectionist, it frustrated me. As a usually intelligent person, it infuriated me. What was I missing? I never found out. To this day, I cannot make my bed correctly. It is made even worse now by a sheet that goes over it, and since the two are the same material, they tend to cling to one another, an embrace of a mother to a child; or an embrace of two friends, plotting against a bully. I was the bully, manipulating the sheets, twisting them, trying to get them to fulfill my vision. I used them to attempt to do what I could not. It was made even more difficult that they were the same color, making it quite confusing in trying to line them each up correctly. Here I am at seventeen-years-old and I still dread making my bed due to my disability. I've recently written in to several prominent medical journals to inquire as to whether or not there is an official name for my condition. I've yet to receive a reply