Hissy Fit - October 2026 - Standards Matter: Ask My Mom

October 2026 Issue
by Elizabeth Skenes Millen

If you want to fight like a girl, make up a bed with my mother. I guarantee you will lose. I also guarantee that if you can make a bed to her standards, you won’t have a bit of trouble in boot camp—or with anything else you set out to do. Even her older sister, who was very particular, wouldn’t make a bed with her.

Mom is 95 years old, so needless to say, she has no option but to be old-school. But I have to admit, I like some of her old-school exactitude, and making a bed to perfection is one of them.

In 1949, Mom went to nursing school at Baptist Hospital in Columbia, S.C., when student nurses, all women at the time, lived in a dormitory with a house mother. Mom has talked about Nan “Nanny” Eidsen, her house mother, numerous times throughout my life. Strict and protective, Nanny made an impact on the young ladies experiencing independence from home for the first time. She ran a tight but loving dormitory, making sure lights were out every night at exactly 10 p.m. She also made sure the girls’ rooms were tidy and their beds made every day.

Mom remembered, “We were on the fifth floor, and we would go in the hall at nighttime and do handstands and flips. Right before 10, we would hear the elevator coming up and all run to our rooms. Sometimes, after 10, I would sit in the closet, door closed and light on, to study. Nanny never knew.”

Making beds was a daily chore for nursing students. Donned in their pristinely pressed white uniform dresses, white stockings, white shoes and white nursing caps, they each had to make eight to 12 beds a day at the hospital with crisp, freshly laundered white sheets.

“They didn’t require us to make beds a certain way, so I made them the way I like mine: no wrinkles; the top sheet even with the head of the mattress; and squared, tucked-in corners. You really should always do your best, no matter what you’re doing. It takes longer to redo something than to just do it right the first time.”

And don’t think I haven’t heard that a million times.

Whether you call it perfectionism or simply having standards, this bed-making precision has passed down two more generations. Not only do I make a perfect bed, but the only people other than Mom willing to make a bed with me are my children—both afflicted with Perfect Bed-Making Syndrome. It comes with a side effect of folding sheets perfectly, too, even the fitted ones.

I don’t have much to make people jealous, but my linen closet, though small, is a masterpiece.

By now, you must be wondering why I’ve dedicated an entire article to the menial task of making a bed. My mother still swears, “If you make your bed, it will make the whole room look neat.” I assure you there is more to it than making your bed, and I think it’s fair game to write a measly 900 words on bed-making when Navy SEAL Admiral William H. McRaven wrote an entire book entitled Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World.

The catalyst for this subject matter was yet another worrisome, doom-and-gloom social media post posing the question: Does everyone still use a top sheet on their bed?

What?
For Pete’s sake, who wouldn’t use a top sheet?
I dared to tell my mom, and she was aghast.

“Well, that’s crazy,” she said with utter disdain. “I sleep under the sheet until I get cold, and then I pull up my blanket or bedspread to get warm. Why not have the sheet? You’ll mess up your bedspread. That’s just dirty. Surely, they have a bedspread.”

This, my dear friends, is another fatality that can be credited to the “minimal effort” crowd, which is the crux of this Hissy Fit.

Why must everything be a shortcut these days? Why are people satisfied with less than their best? It all starts with eliminating the top sheet and goes downhill from there. Next thing you know, people are wearing yoga pants to church, parents are doing their children’s homework and grown men are having a problem leaving home to go to work.

Where have our standards gone? I want them back!

Cutting corners has a way of becoming a habit. Do something halfway often enough, and pretty soon, halfway becomes good enough. And “good enough” can be a slippery slope to a cut-rate existence filled with apathy, complacency and dangerously low standards—the kind of standards that, whether we realize it or not, get passed down to the next generation.

Well, I’m shouting it from the mountaintop: I did not wake up today to be mediocre! Did you?

I don’t want a mediocre existence. I want to do things well. Not because anyone is grading me, but because there is something satisfying about finishing a job and knowing you did your best.

So, yes! Make your bed every day—and do it right. Finish the job. Put all the pillows on. Smooth the sheets. Square the corners. Make it look beautiful.

Because little things matter.

A sense of accomplishment ignites the human psyche. Even little things can motivate us to tackle the next thing, and then the next. Maybe that’s what Admiral McRaven was getting at when he said, “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.”

Mom would agree. After all, she’s been telling me the same thing for decades.

Do it right the first time.
And if nothing else, at least make your bed.
Your bedroom will look fabulous.