When I was single laundry day came but once every two to three weeks. I would wash everything in three loads – including my towels and sheets – and be done with it for another good long time. I didn’t have a regular night for doing laundry, though my penchant (and I use that term sarcastically) for doing it did usually fall on Mondays or Tuesdays. Fact is, I hated doing my laundry and usually only did it when the gauge ran low. You see, I had a gauge – sort of like a gas gauge in a car, but this one involved clothes.
Underwear, actually. When I came to the point that I was out of clean underwear, it was time to do laundry. Needless to say, I had lots of underwear. Why did I have so much underwear? Well, I do know that there were times when I was out of clean underwear that I would go out and buy new underwear just so I could put off doing my laundry for a couple more days.
In my defense, there were many reasons why doing laundry as a single person was a drag. I was single, living in an apartment and had no laundry facilities of my own. That meant I had to haul my laundry somewhere else (even if it was to the laundry room down in the lobby, or at the clubhouse, depending on which apartment I lived in at the time). Then I would have to make sure I had enough change for the machines. Certainly machines take paper money by now, don’t they? Hell, I would think one could use a credit or debit card to operate a pay machine these days. (I wouldn’t know, because it’s been so long since I’ve paid to do laundry, thank God.)
But as much of a drag as laundry was as a single person, it’s 100 times that as a married woman with three kids. It’s not only a drag, it’s a drag-me-down. In fact, laundry seems to be a major part of my life. One would deduce that when one gets married, the laundry load might double. And once two people get settled and have a child, the laundry load might increase by a third.
But it doesn’t work that way. As the children arrive, laundry loads don’t increase proportionally, but exponentially. I haven’t quite figured it out, but it’s the reality. Fortunately, I have a high-capacity front-load washer and dryer set – almost a necessity with a spouse and three children. (I used to have the traditional kind, but we burned those out after the third child arrived. Guess they couldn’t handle that last exponential hike.)
As I write this, I have one load in the washer, one in the dryer, two loads in baskets waiting to be folded, one load folded that needs to be put away, and three loads still sitting on the basement floor that need to be washed. Within the day I should get through the whole process of getting all the current laundry up to date.
But it’s never up to date because as I’m washing, drying and folding, more dirty laundry is being created. As of now, the hampers upstairs are spilling over, their contents waiting for their turn to hit the basement floor.
And hit the basement floor they will – hard. Just about the time I get the floor cleared and I’m feeling content because the laundry is done, that is when the mountain returns. Taking the dirty laundry from the hampers downstairs to the laundry room is among a few of the chores that we give to our boys so they can earn their allowances. I will give them credit for actually getting the contents from the second floor to the basement, but they are severely lacking on their presentation skills. In other words, they dump all the hampers all into one pile without sorting it or anything (to be fair, sorting of laundry is not on their list, though I’m thinking it should be). So it’s up to me chisel into that mountain and segment it down into the various mounds – whites, towels, sheets, husband’s work clothes, kids colored clothes, mine and husband’s colored clothes, etc.
How much longer must I endure this state of laundry limbo? Will things ever go back to the way they were? And why can’t the kids do their own laundry, anyway? For that matter, why do they have to use a different towel every time they take a shower (or sometimes two) each day? Why do those towels always end up wet and gross on the floor instead of hanging up on the rack? These are questions for which I will undoubtedly never receive answers.
I’m confident that as my nest starts to empty in the next few years, the laundry will ease up. But wait. That means the only way I can do less laundry is for my precious children to leave me? I don’t know if I can handle the thought of that right now.
So maybe that’s why God gives me so much laundry – to remind me to appreciate the time I have with my children now before they grow up and leave home.
Okay, God. Good one. But that might be a stretch. After all, how can I take time to appreciate them when I’m so busy doing laundry? But just in case that’s the message He is sending me, I’ll try to look at laundry in a different way. And when my children finally leave and I have to deal with that…well, I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
But for now, I’ve got a mountain to tackle. A mountain of…you guessed it.
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