Mom Says Her 20 Year Old Son Called Exhausted After Cleaning His Entire Apartment Because His Roommates Said They Would Help and Never Did, Then She Told Him I Don’t Feel for You, Son

“So my 20 year old son called me,” begins the Instagram video from thats_inappropriate, and the very next line in her captions is his opening complaint: “I’m exhausted.” Filming herself in front of a wall of windows, she asks him why, then lets his answer pour out one burned in caption at a time.

According to her retelling, he told her he had to clean the entire apartment. “I had to clean the bathroom, I had to clean my room, I had to mop the floors,” the captions read, followed by cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes and wiping the counters. His verdict on the state of the place, as she quotes him: “It was disgusting.”

Her first question was the obvious one: “Where was everybody else?” He said he had asked everybody to help, to pitch in and to clean up their own areas. “And they said they’ll do it,” she recounts. “And you know what?” The punchline is his: “He goes, they never did.” In his words as she relays them, the roommates “make a mess and they don’t clean it up,” and he was “the only one who was cleaning up around here.”

For the rest of the 66 second clip her face does most of the work. She bites her lip, glances sideways at nobody and grins through her reply. “I said that must be insanely frustrating to be the only one who’s picking up,” she tells the camera. He agreed that it really is, and said it got to a point where he figured “I better just clean this whole thing up because it’s gross.” After a long grimace comes her closing line: “I don’t feel for you, son.”

Her caption spells out the joke for anyone who missed it: “What do you mean they said they would do it and then they DIDN’T DO IT?!?!?” She tagged the post #momlife, #parenting, #college and #adulting. The video does not say where her son lives or how many roommates he has, only that he is 20 and sharing an apartment.

Under the post, one mother described the same turn in her own son after he moved out: he “became the house Dad,” she wrote, setting rules about dishes and the temperature for the air conditioning. Another said she answers her grown kids’ complaints with “that feels really familiar,” because even while complaining they have not connected the dots. A third had advice for the son himself: talk to the roommates rather than keep cleaning up their mess.

Settle the Chores Before the Lease Starts

Colleges that put students in shared suites already treat chores as something to write down. The Cleaning and Space Agreement used by Caltech Housing asks roommates to decide who takes out the trash and the recycling, who vacuums the common spaces, who cleans the kitchen floors and counters and the bathroom surfaces, who does dishes and who buys cleaning and household supplies, how often each job happens and whether the jobs rotate. It also covers how cabinet and fridge space will be divided, what can be stored in shared areas, who submits maintenance requests and a thermostat range everyone can live with, which is the same issue that commenter’s son ended up making rules about.

If your child is about to move in with roommates, that list makes a good script for the first week, before anyone has a chance to say “they’ll do it” and then not do it:

• Get every roommate together in the first few days and write out the jobs on the Caltech form: trash, recycling, vacuuming, kitchen counters and floors, bathroom surfaces, dishes and supplies.
• Put one name and a frequency beside each job, and agree whether the names rotate each week.
• Split cabinet and fridge space so one person’s dirty dishes and leftovers stay in one person’s space.
• Agree who buys shared cleaning supplies and how the cost is split.
• Decide now what happens when someone skips a turn, so the person who notices does not quietly end up mopping the whole place.
• Agree who reports broken things to the landlord or housing office, and keep a copy of the signed list on everyone’s phone.

When the phone call comes anyway, her question is still the right first one: where was everybody else? The next useful one is whether those chores were ever written down with names on them. If they were, your kid has something specific to bring back to the roommates instead of another weekend scrubbing the kitchen alone.