The Endless Job of Laundry
As a girl growing up, I couldn’t wait to be a wife and a mom. I envisioned driving around town in a Volvo SUV, picking up the kids from practices. Oooh, the idea of grocery shopping, cleaning my home, baking, wow – it would be so nice. I would grow up to be a June Cleaver extraordinaire.
However, since becoming an adult, I’ve changed my mind. Laundry has pushed me over the edge! It doesn’t matter the day. It doesn’t matter the season—in my house it is constant. Wintertime adds extra layers and snow clothes to the mix. Summertime adds beach towels and bathing suits. Unlike you and I, my kids cannot use something more than once nor can they tolerate wearing a wet bathing suit or damp snow clothes. They must break out an entirely set of clothing which also ends up in the laundry.
These kids don’t know clean from dirty. Outside of bathing suits and snow clothes, they can’t make decisions on what to wear and they change their clothes three times a day, so in the end, a mix of clean and dirty all get combined and end up recycled through the laundry mill. I am the laundry mill. Sure, my family members would gladly do the laundry for me and I’ve weighed that option. However, chances are pretty good we would all be walking around in similar shaded apparel, bubbles would be flooding my basement floor and the appliance repair man would make a mint off me. As a result, I generally take on the bulk of this very important job.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop with the kids. I have a husband who wears many hats and with that comes many types of clothing. He wears business attire for work and is casual for our businesses which generally have him covered in paint and many other oily, dingy kind of things, so there are a number of clothing changes daily for him, too.
Quite honestly, my washer and dryer are of little help. I feed them things and they never give it all back to me. I mean where do the mates to those socks go? And have you ever seen how nicely a string from a jersey can get wrapped around other clothes so you find a knotted mess later? Let’s not forget the stray pen that accidentally makes its way into the laundry and explodes on everything or the gum left in a pocket that melted into the stitching of the fabric.
I think every woman has been there or is there with the laundry war, but none of them have ever won. So, I will continue to carry the baskets of dirty clothes down to my basement. I will continue to sort, remove stains, fold and put away. I have accepted the responsibility. However, I no longer aspire to be June Cleaver and live the impossible dream. I just try to stay that one step ahead and, at the end of the day, I wrap myself in my favorite laundry-fresh smelling blanket and say I did it. I may not have maneuvered through it as gracefully as June Cleaver, but I did it – for another day I took care of them, the ones I love most.
