Whose job is it to push in the kitchen chairs?

I am almost always the first one awake in our house in the morning, which means I'm the first one to see the condition in which certain younger members of our family have left the kitchen.

Oftentimes when Terry and I go to bed, some combination of my children can be found in the kitchen eating anything they can get their hands on, looking at their phones, listening to music, doing homework, or even all four of those things simultaneously.

I never know exactly when they go to bed because I fall asleep almost instantly and am absolutely dead to the world for the next several hours.

So morning comes and I wake up. Usually I get dressed to go running or walking, depending on my mood and overall physical state, and the next thing I do is go into the kitchen to feed the cats.

Sometimes the kitchen is pristine, exactly the way Terry or I left it the night before.

Most of the time, though, that's not the case. Most of the time there are things left on the floor. Food on the counter. Crumbs on the table. Lights blazing away to the benefit of no one in particular.

All of which annoys me. But nothing is more grating than to see the chairs pulled out three feet from the kitchen table rather than pushed under said table, which is where they belong.

I don't know why this irritates me so much. Maybe because it looks so much nicer and it's SO easy to do. When you get up from the table, just push your chair in. Don't worry about waking us up, because it can be done quietly. Push. Your. Chair. In.

And yet they don't do it, no matter how many times I tell them to do it. No punishment, no incentive, no amount of cajoling can change this behavior.

I always end up pushing in those chairs in the morning. You might say, "Well, they know you'll just do it for them, so why should they?" Ah, but you see, they couldn't care less whether those chairs are pushed in. If I leave the chairs out, it won't even occur to them that anything is wrong when they come down to the kitchen the next morning.

Just to make sure we're clear here, this should be the job of the person who actually sits in the chair the night before, right? This isn't my job, it's their job. Right? Am I crazy? This is a simple request, and I am in no way being unreasonable in making it. I just need you to tell me that.

Because one of these days I'm going to snap. I'm going to take one of those rogue chairs, carry it upstairs, and hit a child over the head with it. And no matter how you look at it, that's premeditated murder right there.

I'm having a really hard time resisting the urge to say, "But it will so be worth it."