This mom got dragged — for airing her dirty laundry online.
Laura Marie (@lmegordon) thought she was posting a harmless anecdote about her son and hubby’s bachelor-style behavior on X (formerly Twitter), (which seems to have since been deleted) while she was out of town — but instead, she kicked off a digital donnybrook about marriage, parenting — and yes, bed sheets.
“I left my son at home with my husband for two days, and the first thing my son said to me when I came home was, ‘Can I have sheets on my bed again?’” the user recently tweeted.
She followed up, noting, “THE CLEAN SHEETS WERE IN THE DRYER WHEN I LEFT!”
With thousands of views, the tweet clearly tickled plenty of fellow moms — but also unleashed a wave of unsolicited criticism from the digital parenting police.
“This is one of those things you shouldn’t post about your husband on the internet. This is why men do not want to be married anymore,” huffed one commenter, clutching their pearls — and possibly a fitted sheet.
Another asked, “I almost don’t believe these stories!! Don’t men use bed sheets on them?!”
Then came the full-on judgment.
“You don’t think it’s kinda crazy that your husband and son [can’t] do things like make a bed?” one finger-wagger wrote.
“What is he going to do in college?! Will this be rectified in the coming years?”
Laura Marie — clearly no stranger to a household division of labor — clapped back with context.
“I handle laundry and my husband handles groceries,” she responded.
“We share cooking and cleaning. And to be honest, I don’t know that my husband cares how clean his sheets are.”
But when the mob turned its torches toward her marriage, she didn’t roll over.
“My husband and I are madly in love. We celebrate 20 years of marriage in August,” she declared.
As for her son’s role in the sheet showdown?
“The thing is, my son is almost 13. He is old enough to take ownership of the issue OR to ask his dad. The both of them are to blame. I was just amused,” she wrote.
Her post is the latest battle in the never-ending modern parenting war — a la Amanda (@free.as.amother), the Instagram mom who went viral last week for not playing with her kids at the park.
“Their parent is not their court jester,” declared one of Amanda’s defenders.
Others on Instagram griped that parents aren’t playtime clowns and kids need to figure out fun (and friendship) on their own.
Just like Laura Marie, Amanda got roasted and toasted by internet know-it-alls for simply choosing her lane — or bench, in this case — at the parenting playground.
In a recent essay written by DeVonne Goode for Parents regarding the viral X sheets situation, the author wrote that this debate “shows how some social norms around parenting roles can quickly be used to condemn, when in many cases, they can simply be meant to bring levity.”
As for a potential solution, Goode noted that social media users can “work to share more parenting stories of what’s actually happening in full context” while also speaking up “when someone is misreading a situation with intent to disparage.”
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