laundry–the quixotic years

Last updated on: November 3, 2015 at 12:28 pm by Anne Kennedy

laundry–the quixotic years 2015-11-03T12:28:14-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Being in a wise and sagacious frame of mind I thought I would bequeath you all some of my vast experience and knowledge on the subject of Household Management, particularly in the realm of Laundry. I’m sure you’re all sitting fretfully at your computers or on your tablets, or scrolling down your phones and thinking, ‘what on earth am I going to do about my Laundry?’ and wishing that another exasperated MommyBlogger will just post One More Time about this important matter. Perhaps you’re casting about for some scripture or spiritual insight, in which case, go read the Gospel Coalition. Or maybe you wish you were reading Simcha, in which case, go read her. But just maybe you thought, I wonder how Anne manages her laundry, in which case, read on.

My first piece of advice is to have a baby every other year so your mother will feel sorry for you and come bail you out for a month. This is important because your mother will be appalled at your table linens and the awful stains on the fronts of shirts and how many buttons are missing and things like that. She will exhaust herself selflessly on your behalf, working diligently away on laundry problems you hadn’t even noticed. When she eventually prepares to go home you she will anxiously guide you through your once familiar laundry room and impress on you the importance of Doing Your Laundry Every Day and spraying Krud Kutter On Everything. She will have reorganized your whole system to make sense and work smoothly. You will weep as she gets on the plane.

So my second piece of advice is, after your mother leaves, cry for two weeks and four days until your husband notices and, in a desperate bid to make you dry up, takes over The Laundry. He will do it masterfully and consistently and you will notice, after six months, that you seem to be getting fatter and fatter. Then you will Realize that he has shrunken all your sweaters, and washed all the boys Sunday Shirts with a pen mixed in so they can never be worn again. But then he will say, I really like doing the laundry because you seem so calm and unhysterical and you will decide you don’t care about your sweaters.

My third piece of advice is to watch a season of the Duggers and discover that the reason you are struggling with your laundry is because you had a bunch of children and that if you didn’t have any children at all, you wouldn’t feel badly about yourself because of your inadequacy about The Laundry. Keep watching and discover that the Duggers keep all their dressers and hanging things in The Laundry Room. That very day move every single clothes storage option into your laundry room.

Now you can properly address the following problems.
1. Apparently its too hard to take something off and fling it on the stairs for the person whose job it is to carry The Laundry into The Laundry Room. Everybody is exhausted and troubled by other things and has to be reminded to pick….up…..the…..shirt…..and……put……it…..in……the……laundry.
2. Apparently its very difficult to find something to wear and to remedy this problem, all one’s clothes have to be flung all over the floor of the Laundry Room and carefully stirred into the pile of dirty things so that there is no longer any way to discern what is Clean and what is Dirty.
3. Apparently its very difficult for the person whose job it is to carry The Laundry into The Laundry Room not to take a detour through the basement dropping socks and shirts and trousers and skirts and unmentionables in a line as if making a way to get back home if left in the forest by an evil Step Mother.

Decide, after reading a lot of blogs, that your mildly spacy ten year old should be given the task of gathering up all these scattered clothes and sorting things by color into bins. Know, in your heart, as you prepare to train her for this New Important Task, that you are setting yourself up for a whole new world of frustration and rage because Children Are So Incompetent. Decide that you’re going to do it anyway and that maybe God will have pity on you and come back today, or tomorrow at the latest.

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