My Laundry Womb

Well...Christmas is officially over at our house.  It took 3 weeks but we did it...we've celebrated it until we could celebrate it no more.  Decorations are down...pine needles are gone...leftovers persist.

After having spent the past few weeks on holidays with the kids home, entertaining many people, and having house guests, our laundry room was understandably feeling the pressure.  There were piles of dirty clothes, sheets, and table cloths strewn about this tiny room.  Yesterday we decided to roll our sleeves up and begin to tackle Laundry Mountain. 

Let me start off by saying that I actually quite like this chore.  It makes me feel like I'm taking good care of my family without having to actually be with them.  I can lock myself into that small, windowless space, and launder and fold the clothes of the family that only resides inside my imagination.  The family that promptly takes their neatly arranged laundry baskets up into their room, and puts them away in their closets that look like store displays;  everything facing the same way...grouped by categories.  Underwear and socks all in little rows ready to be taken out the next day and not only be worn, but be appreciated by my family.  This family in my imagination smiles inwardly each morning, taking a moment to give thanks for such soft, wonderful smelling laundry that their generous and talented mother provides them with love.

The reality is that once the clothes leave my little laundry-womb where everything is clean and warm and safe, it is plunged into a dangerous arena where nothing is as it should be...where it is every shirt for itself. 

I usually put the laundry baskets at the bottom of the stairs for the kids to take with them the next time they go up to their rooms.  "There's laundry ready to go up", I bellow helpfully.  "Kay" is usually the reply I hear. 

Perhaps I am not up on the current lingo.  Perhaps "kay" means "I'm never going to do this...I'm going to just pretend it's not there...in fact I'm going to step over it several times a day until it magically disappears."  That is, in fact, what they mean by "kay." 

The poor little shirts and socks in there are pawed through...tossed back in if they don't match the pants of the day...the cat sleeps on them...other things are piled on top of them.  I am sure they are now dreaming of the life they used to have inside the laundry room where they were treated with love and respect.

I have become used to this routine...I have tried to get over it and not place so much symbolism on clean clothes.  However, today I reached my limit.  My kids are now of an age that some of their clothes require ironing.  Not a lot...but some.  There are usually 3 or 4 things each week that if I don't iron them, they make my children look like we've made them sleep their clothes in the bathtub and then just dried them off and sent them to school.

Today as I was ironing my son's black dress shirt...after having sorted this black dress shirt, washed this black dress shirt, and then dried this black dress shirt...I realized that he hasn't worn this black dress shirt...not in a good long while.  And then I recall that I also did this black dress shirt last week.  Then it hits me.  He is SO Lazy that it is easier for him to just put this shirt back into the laundry basket upstairs, than to pull out a hanger and place it nicely in his closet.  I hit the roof.  I am flashing back to how many times I have touched this shirt as I moved it along through the laundry process...to my ironing this stupid shirt TWICE now for no reason.  I am tempted to shred this shirt and feed it to him piece by piece.  Or make him go to school wearing only this shirt, since it's looking so sharp and clean.  Visions of him being forced to wear this very shirt to his graduation ceremony then fill my head....his hairy, adult arms sticking way out of this tiny black shirt...his adult-sized midriff showing below where his well ironed shirt ends.

Instead I decide to charge a fee for any articles of clothes that I have had to launder unnecessarily.  This will also apply to my daughter who is just as guilty of this particular activity.  Hers is not often the result of laziness...but of her need to wear 16 different outfits a day.  These outfits go into the laundry, even if they've only been worn for a fraction of a minute, then tossed aside.  So I need to log the outfit they are wearing each morning because these are the clothes I am willing to wash at no charge...everything else they will pay for.

In order to carry this out effectively, I will need some additional equipment.  Some way to capture an image of them, catalogue it, and then cross-reference that with what I find in their laundry hamper.  Perhaps some sort of bar-coding and a scanner?

Now I'm feeling like this is all getting a little complicated.  Maybe to break my kids' bad laundry habits I should go back to using some good, old fashioned shouting.