Recently, one of my children asked me what was actually a very good, albeit annoying, question: why wasn’t I any fun? At first I thought about denying it (“What? I’m so much fun!”), but then I realized that the better route would be to tell them the truth: the whole truth. And so, today, I’m going to do just that.
I used to be fun.
Ask anyone: I was always up for a good time, ready to go out on a moment’s notice—or better yet, ready to stay in and mix up a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Breakfast for dinner! Movie night! Picnic at the creek! But then, somewhere along the way, all that fun was traded in for something else, something that was so the epitome of not fun that it wasn’t like the fun simply disappeared, it was more like it was physically sucked out of me. That thing? That soul-sucking, fun-killing thing that changed it all? Your laundry.
Notice I didn’t say the laundry. This is because, as someone who can still remember scrounging around for enough quarters to schlep my clothes down to the laundry mat on a bicycle, I am still very cognizant of what a pleasure it is to be able to do laundry in the comfort of my own home. So much so that I really don’t mind being the one who usually does the laundry for the whole house.
And it’s not the fact that you two seem to generate five times as much dirty laundry as the rest of the house: I accept the fact that, while I may have given up on the whole concept of fashion and have settled down into a Steve Jobseian-like existence of basically wearing the same outfit every single day, you two still believe that what you wear makes a difference, and therefore have to change clothes as often as ten times a day before finally hitting upon the right combination of concert t-shirt and ripped up jeans.
No, what has finally done it to me—what has sucked the last little vestigial bit of fun out of the very marrow of my bones—is the fact that so much of the laundry you generate is not, in fact laundry at all, but rather pieces of clean clothing that have simply lost their way. True, they are not exactly clean, these articles of clothing that have been untimely ripp’d from their drawers and then thrown on the floor to be trampled, but they’re not really dirty, either. They’re in a sort of “laundry limbo;” they are the unbaptized infant souls of laundry—neither dirty nor clean, sinners nor saints. And, as such, they are killing me.
Look, I know that mountains of laundry just come with the territory. I knew, going into this gig, that the laundry that accompanies children is, by it’s very nature, both a Sisyphean and a Herculean task. (Imagine Herculean cleaning out the Aegean stables every single week, and you’ll begin to understand what it’s like doing laundry in a typical American household.) What I didn’t realize was that it would also be a Promethean task, one which, instead of my liver being eaten by an eagle over and over again for all eternity, it would be my soul that was eaten by washing a shirt three times before I noticed it still had the tags on it.
Washing (and folding and putting away) clothes that have never even been worn takes away the one redeeming aspect of doing laundry: the sense of accomplishment. And it was that sense of accomplishment that gave me the energy (and the desire) at the end of the day to have some well-deserved “fun.”
Does that answer your question? Good, because if you’ll excuse me I have to go wash that Dora bathrobe you haven’t worn in seven years—again.