What is this horrifying plot, you ask? I refer to….brace
yourself….
Laundry.
If, at this point, you think I am being overly dramatic, you
are obviously not the person responsible for laundry in your household. Or,
perhaps you do not have a million children. Whatever. Please feel free to stop
reading and continue eating your bonbons in peace.
People. The battle against laundry has been lost, long ago.
It is no longer a task to be accomplished, no longer a chore to be done. It has
mutated into its own life force. (I have a theory that such a mutation was
made possible by the amazingly powerful stench that now emanates from the dirty
clothes of my pre-teen children – GIRLS, no less! – but I haven’t had a chance
to prove this, scientifically speaking.)
This life force is most assuredly not a benevolent one. Oh no,
my friends. It is malevolent. It lives to destroy us, through any means
necessary. (Though since it lacks limbs, those means will probably involve
slowly burying us alive, or possibly gassing us to death with the
aforementioned stench…)
It is never-ending, endless, soul-sucking repetition. And it
is warping my brain. I used to be a (mostly) reasonable, intelligent person. Now,
I stand in my laundry room muttering curses at little lacy shirts that have the
gall to demand hand-washing. REALLY, lacy
shirts?! You’re going to be all high-maintenance and sassy?? My warped
brain spins as I try to recall who bought my children these oh-so-darling
outfits, so that I can be sure to repay their incredible thoughtfulness next
Christmas with something similarly easy to care for, like a box of puppies. Or
I saturate the legs of jeans with stain remover as I wonder how it is humanly
possible for a child out of elementary school to get marker on clothing during
an art project. Seriously? Who is this
kid, Jackson Pollack?! I’d better be going to a gallery opening ten years from
now…
I’m telling you. It’s turning me into a crazy person. And it’s
not my fault. Laundry could be a plausible legal defense, and probably a
successful one if there were enough mothers on a jury. The last thing I remember is starting my seventh load of laundry that
day…everything after that is a blur…
There are brief moments of clarity, of lovely lucid thought,
as I fold the eleventh pair of little pink panties. There are jolts of joy,
utterly irrational, when a lonesome polka-dotted sock is miraculously reunited
with its mate. Yes, it is highly probable that these moments are their own
signs of insanity, their own little cries for help. I’ll grant you that. And
yet…
It’s been said that humans have an innate need to assign
meaning to their activities, even to those activities that seem inherently
meaningless. Some see this as foolishness, this desire to find significance in
the insignificant. But what if that desire was born not from emptiness, but
from that thing within us that connects us to the divine completeness? What if we search for meaning because it’s actually
there, hidden in plain sight?
Because, really…endless loads of laundry aren’t endless. There
will come a day when there will be far fewer dirty clothes to wash, far fewer
clean warm clothes to pull from the dryer and fold. The million children will
not be children anymore, and – God willing – they will have their own place to
do their own laundry (which, to be clear, will not be MY laundry room).
So perhaps the meaning has something to do with love, and
service, and the prayers that can be said over little stained pants and socks
that will never find a mate, for the growing legs and arms and feet that will
wear them out of our warm safe house and into a sometimes cold and scary world.
Or maybe it has to do with how God must feel when He scrubs the same dirty sins
off me that I came to Him with yesterday, and the day before, and a million
days before that, and how He keeps cleaning and forgiving even when it would
seem hopeless to anyone else.
Or maybe all of the above, and more that my laundry-warped
brain hasn’t come up with yet.
So, keep up the good fight, my fellow laundry-doers. And don’t
let that pile of dirty clothes fool you – it has nefarious plans to smother you
in your sleep. I’m onto you, stinky
socks!
