Dirty Laundry

Our high efficiency washer and dryer, originally uploaded by NCVillamar.

My mother likes to tell this story:   It was 1974, and we had just arrived in the United States and moved into our first house. I was six years old. One afternoon, my mother asked me to help her take laundry off the clothesline and fold them. We had a washing machine, but it would be a while until we would buy a dryer. In the meantime, we had four clothes lines in the backyard, near the peach tree. We had a lot of laundry, because there were five of us in the family, and my sister and brother were only three and one, respectively. I don't know how many baskets of laundry I had gone through, but at one point, I apparently started crying.

"I want to go back to the Philippines," I told my mother through my tears.

"Why?" asked my mother, her heart breaking because her firstborn was feeling pangs of homesickness.

"Because," I started, "in the Philippines we had the help doing our laundry, but here we have to wash our clothes ourselves."

My parents had lef their homeland to pursue freedom, democracy, unlimited educational opportunities for their children, and upward mobility. But never mind all that -- I was willing to give it all up because I hated doing laundry.

When Randy and I were first married, I had a reprieve from doing laundry. We had a wonderful housekeeper who did it for us. Then, after we had Skyler, that housekeeper also became our nanny, and she continued to take care of washing our clothes and putting them away. Her help was a godsend because Randy had gotten a promotion at work and was left with few precious hours at home. With assistance with the house work, Randy was able to spend more of his free time with Skyler. Our nanny left when Skyler started preschool, and, having forgotten how much work it is to keep a house in order, Randy and I decided that we would try to do the housework ourselves. That was when I resumed the majority of the laundry duties.

In my house, there are no toys on the floor over which one might trip and sprain an ankle. There are, however, mountains of clothes over which one may trip and break a neck. They are either dirty and need to be laundered, washed and need to be folded, or folded and need to be put away. We own approximately seven laundry baskets. My disdain for doing laundry is perplexing for a couple of reasons. You see, I love clothes. I love to shop for them, and I love to wear them. Logically, it should follow that I love to wash them. Furthermore, my mother loves to do laundry -- she is the Laundry Queen -- and one would expect laundrophilia to be passed on through the genes.

Alanis Morrisette wrote a song called "Isn't It Ironic" and it was number one on the charts in 1997. The lyrics go something like this:

An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes two later
And isn't it ironic...don't you think?
It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
Who would've thought...it figures

At the height of the song's popularity, a literature professor allegedly wrote to Ms. Morrisette to explain that these things were not exactly examples of "irony." They were just things that sucked.

Because Randy is somewhat of a neat-freak who deals immediately with the business of washing, folding, and putting away, I find it highly ironic that he married someone who did not inherit the Laundry Queen's laundry-loving genes. Randy just thinks it sucks. He wants to do the kids' and my laundry for me, but, as much as I hate it, I won't let him, because (1) he already does so much and I feel like the laundry really should be my contribution to the household, (2) he always forgets to use fabric softener and I end up getting static electricity shock, and (3) once he put my bras in the dryer and ruined the cups. So I prefer to do the laundry myself. When I get around to it, that is.

My mother will freely confess to not liking to keep house. In the Philippines she had a busy medical practice and hired housekeepers to tend to domestic matters. In America, she does what needs to be done, although she would rather not. But when it comes to washing clothes, well, she considers that and everything associated with it as her turf, and I pity the fool who dares to encroach on her territory. Let me paint a clearer picture: When my father was critically ill and in one of the most highly-regarded hospitals in the world, my mother insisted on taking home the linens that were being used on my father's hospital bed so that she could wash them herself. Only the best would do for my father.

The woman IS good. You wouldn't think that laundry could be anything special, but you ought to see hers: everything folded into perfect squares and rectangles, even underwear; socks matched exactly, proving that there is no such thing as a sock monster; cotton shirts ironed and hangered as if they had just arrived from a professional cleaner's; pants and jeans hung so a neat crease forms down the legs. The whites are blinding in all their crisp whiteness, the darks are the right shade of darkness, and are lint free, and the blacks -- that's right, she separates darks from blacks! -- are still black and not some faded version of the original. And the scent! This is really the element that earned her the title of Laundry Queen. It's the kind of scent that makes you inhale extra deeply, the kind of scent that gets turned into a candle. Even though she has shared her secret with all of us in the family (hint: it involves Downey April Fresh), no one can get it quite right.

After my father passed away, my mother came to stay with us in Maryland part of the year. She insisted on doing our laundry for us. We felt bad because we just wanted her to relax, and we didn't want her to feel like she had to do our housework, but she insisted, saying that her granddaughter deserved it. Finding it difficult to disagree that Skyler, our only child at the time, did indeed deserve to smell good and wear bright whites, we handed over the metaphorical keys to the laundry room and let my mother take charge.

Soon we saw various types of gigantic, economy-size plastic jugs of liquid detergents, and large buckets of powdered detergents, all lined up neatly on the laundry room shelves. There was a different detergent for different types of clothes: colored, white, delicate, black, children's, hand-wash only. There was the biggest bottle of Downey liquid fabric softener that I have ever seen in my life. There were tubes, spray cans, and sticks of stain-removers, boxes containing thousands of fabric softener sheets, and several containers of bleach. We went through propane so fast that the propane deliveryman began to eye us suspiciously, as if he suspected us of diverting our supply to provide energy to a small foreign country. The hum of the washing machine was so constant that between loads, when it wasn't running, we would look up from what we were doing and ask each other, "Do you notice something?  Something doesn't seem right.  What's wrong?"  Randy became acutely aware of when laundry-related items went on sale so that he could replenish our supply lest a shortage of detergent disrupt the flow of laundry. Randy never had to stay up late to wash shirts or socks because he had used up his last ones that morning. My mother the Laundry Queen had converted our laundry room into a place of serious laundering. It was awesome.

Randy and I have had a rocky history with laundry. We sold our townhouse before we found a house we wanted to buy, so in the meantime, my friend Gergana let us use her empty townhouse in a nice part of the city called  Otterbein.  I loved the location of the house, but location of the laundry room?  Not so much.  The washer and dryer were in the basement, accessible through a trap door on the part of the living room floor directly underneath the sofa. Moving the sofa, lifting the trap door, and going down the narrow staircase into a dim basement in order to perform a task that I already detested anyway was just too much to bear. During those days I just let Randy do all the laundry, and didn't care if my bras were totally deformed or if the jolt of electricity that passed through my staticky clothes gave me heart palpitations when when I got dressed in the morning. Then, after we moved into our house (but before the Laundry Queen arrived), we bought a high efficiency washer/dryer set that took the manufacturer several months to install for reasons too long and boring to get into here.  For months, we had to take our laundry to a laundromat every few days, lugging overflowing baskets, detergent, and rolls of quarters with us.

When I became pregnant with our second child, Jagger, I could barely roll my rotund self out of bed, never mind clean the house or wash clothes. Fortunately, our former housekeeper agreed to make the commute from the city and came back to work for us! She even agreed to do the laundry again. I don't know if I got spoiled by the Laundry Queen's style of laundering, or if I developed different, higher standards under the Laundry Queen's tutelege, but for some reason, after Jagger was born, I decided that I wanted to do most of our laundry myself, and I took back that chore from our housekeeper. I still have a problem with putting clothes away, but that aside, I sort of enjoy separating the colored from the blacks and the whites, measuring out the various liquids and powders to achieve the perfect ratio, punching in the specific settings on the washing machine, transferring the clothes, and then waiting for the buzzer to go off on the dryer. Isn't that ironic?