Laundry, however, I do not love so much

I do the vast majority of the laundry on Monday. Oh sure, sometimes we’re out of towels on Thursday or have some kind of emergency load on Saturday, but by and large Monday is for Laundry.

I hate Monday. I hate it so danged much. Every Monday, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I wake up thinking, @*^&@ing laundry!!

Oh, I’ve tried other ways. I’ve tried the ‘one load a day’ thing. I’ve tried doing just a load or two every other day, or on weekends. I’ve tried not doing it at all, which backfired quite badly and we do not speak of it to this day.

I’ve tried forcing my husband to do it, and I even once (once, one time, precisely) sent it out. You know, where you take the dirty laundry in Hefty bags to somebody who does laundry for a living, and have them do it?

HA. Yeah. I took it to the Laundromat and paid the old hag nice lady to ‘wash and fold’ our laundry, which at the time was not even a quarter of what I do every week now.

She charged me $45, by “folded” she meant “balled up and shoved into the bag” and by “clean” she meant “saw water at some point in the proceedings”.

Ah, those were the days. The idea of paying $45 for what amounted to two small loads of laundry absolutely floors me today. But back then, it was “Oh, I just don’t wanna deal with it!” {flip hair, pout prettily, cough up money}

Sometimes, I fantasize about doing it now. We just got a laundry and dry cleaning service here in town which will come to your house, pick up the bags of dirty laundry, make it not-dirty, and then return it to your door in neat reusable white ‘clean laundry’ bags.

On the one hand, my eyebrows climbed right on up into my hairline and have stayed there ever since. We are a low income area. There is not a whole lot of real money around here; what money there was came largely from people cashing out their home equity as fast as they could so they could buy all the stuff they couldn’t otherwise afford.

Now that the house-as-ATM deal has dried up, well. You’re not going to find a whole lot of people who are willing to pay $25 or more for a single load of laundry.

But at the same time, I occasionally find myself fondling their fliers (often on Sunday, go figure). Ooooooh, pickup and delivery included…

But by and large, the way that works best for me is to just suck it up and do it all on Monday. Just do it. All of it. Throw it all down the stairs, sort, and start the machines chugging along. And bitch about it endlessly to anyone who makes the mistake of crossing my path.

I don’t know why I hate doing laundry so much. After all, it isn’t like the pioneer days where you had to scrub the clothes by hand with lye soap on a washboard and then hang them up to dry. I have me a faaaaancy machine with extra-super-huge capacity. I have an excellent backyard clothesline, plus also a faaaaaaancy gas dryer in the (extremely likely) event that I don’t feel like hanging up the wash, or if it’s raining, or whatever.

I don’t mind ironing, for heaven’s sake. I don’t mind cleaning bathrooms (much) or vacuuming or taking a scrub brush to the tile grout. Even doing the dishes – which, by the way, I’m thinking of putting on my business card: Tama, Expert Dishwasher Feeder – doesn’t raise my hackles the way laundry will.

I don’t know why I have such an antipathy toward laundry.

It smells good. Fresh from the dryer, it even feels good. (I hate folding cold laundry, though. I’ve been known to put them on timed dry for a few minutes, just to warm them up a little so I don’t have to fold cold laundry.) And there is definitely a visual gratification as well, to see all those neatly folded clothes back in the drawer.

Maybe it is the constant nature of it – doing laundry is indeed a lot like shoveling the driveway while it is still snowing. For a few glorious minutes each Monday, every single hamper in the house is empty.

By Tuesday morning, they’re already filling up again. And someone is complaining because they want the dress they wore Monday to be ready for whatever event they’ve come up with on Friday. And there’s a lone sock sitting in the middle of the floor, it’s clean mate in my ‘where the heck is your mate, mate?’ drawer.

And then there’s the constant walking up and down the stairs with the basket slung on my hip. Up, down, up, down.

ALSO, there is the fact that I start running out of gas long before the last load comes out. Now, I’ve tried to work around this by doing all the clothing first, and making the last loads the sheets and towels because they’re faster to fold and put away. But there are still times when we get to Wednesday and there are still piles of clean, folded laundry making a nightly pilgrimage from my bed to whatever flat surface I can find and back again the next morning.

And the endless frustration which is trying to get the kids to put their clothing away. Because you know where I find their clean clothing, after I set it on their bed with instructions to put it away?

ALL of it crammed into one drawer. Or, dumped next to the bed. Or, under the bed. Or, their brother gets in there and plays with it. $45,000 in toys strewn throughout the house, the kid wants to play with his sister’s underwear – typical.

I about died laughing, though, when I walked in and he was putting Boo Bug’s underwear on one of her dolls, scolding it the whole time. The doll was, of course, nekkid, because this is what my girls do with their dolls: strip off their clothes, throw the clothes one direction and the doll the other and move on to other things. And there was Captain Adventure, tugging underwear onto it and going, “Baby no! Baby, no-no-no. Uh-oh! Baby! Docks! Oh no. No. No. Babba babba bigda mama no unna inga mah! *sigh!*”

I have no idea, but it sounded a lot like me: “Boo Bug! What are you doing? No. NO! Don’t start playing with that! Go and put on your socks right now, we have to GO! Honestly I don’t know what’s the MATTER with you! *sigh*”

ANYWAY.

On those rare occasions when I can keep myself focused and get the old job done, it's all good. All the laundry is done and put away and I can sit back come the evening and say to myself, “I don’t hafta do this again until NEXT Monday!”

And I feel real good about that, because next Monday might as well be a week from never. I have six whole days before I have to worry about it again.

However, today being Monday…the danged dryer is beeping at me. AGAIN.

Maybe that’s my problem. I dislike being ordered around by sleek white machine which go “beep-beep-beep-BEEP! Beep-beep-beep-BEEP!” in supercilious tones. “Oh, laundry girl! Come forth and give us service!!”

Ya know, I went to college, people!

{mutter grumble LAUNDRY grouse gotcher ‘beep’ right here, pal, kvetch carry on trudge trudge trudge}