by
Jennifer HanlonNearly everyday I wage a silent war in my home: The War on Laundry. I know it's pathetic that in my narrow little world, a pile of clean, folded laundry is a thing of ongoing torment versus a thing of pride and privilege. After all, people in many parts of the world would be thrilled to have such a "problem". Still, problems are relative, and this is mine.
Take one house. Add 2 adults, a child, and a dog. Blend thoroughly with a little sweat, grass, sand, dirt, paint, Play-Doh, ketchup, Juicy Juice, ink, rotavirus, and urine. (The child is potty training, after all.) This is a recipe for about 8-10 loads of laundry a week, give or take.
Now, add one baby to the mix. Ka-boom! You've got yourself another 4 loads of laundry per week. How can this be? It defies all logic that one additional human, who is approximately 1/10th the size of me, can produce 2-3 times the laundry of the average adult. The laundry is so much cuter, but there's so much more of it!
In my house the laundry room is in the basement. That means I can go for days without actually seeing the pile, thereby allowing myself to live in denial that a rapidly-growing-cancerous-lesion-of-a-laundry-pile is growing unchecked in the bowels of the house. If I let it go for more than a few days, I start to feel anxious. Eventually, I'll go downstairs for something – a beer or a child's toy or a screwdriver – and there it will be: The Noxious Pile of Decaying Fabric. The Cold Mountain of Soiled Garments. Insidious Suburban Laundry Sprawl.
It didn't used to be this way. Once upon a time I was a freewheeling single gal. Just me, one laundry basket, and pocket full of quarters for the 'mat. Remember those lazy days spent at the laundromat, reading someone's discarded 3-month-old People magazines that you could never afford to buy yourself? Okay, so those days weren't so great. But what a difference today: I own at least nine laundry baskets, my very own washer and dryer, and an arsenal of cleansing, soaking, stain-lifting, and softening products. Oh, and a husband whose laundry incompetence is so practiced and so selective as to border on pathological. ("Oh, you mean wool still shrinks in the dryer?")
And speaking of that arsenal: it is interesting to me how the two Weapons of Laundry Mass Destruction – The Washer and The Dryer – were once so loved and now so hated by me. Even as a kid, my favorite chore was doing laundry. After I bought my first house – washer and dryer included – I hugged them. Repeatedly. To own appliances after years of renting – what joy! But I digress…
I'm told that this too shall pass, but not before it gets just a bit worse. After all, babies turn into teens with bigger, smellier laundry. Laundry with attitude! But at least they can do it themselves, right? Or am I living in a fantasy world?
