I always knew that having children was going to mean bringing lots and lots of dissent into my house: since a child’s primary goal is to have a good time, and a parent’s primary goal is to keep their children alive, it kind of goes without saying that the two groups are destined to disagree. A lot. We disagree about how much soda is acceptable for breakfast (um…none?), how many people are allowed to be in one car at one time (one per seatbelt, unless they are wearing red noses, rainbow afros, and the car in question is a VW Bug), and how many nights it is okay to stay away from home without calling to let someone know where you are (again: none). But as I said, these were the types of disagreements I expected to be having—what I didn’t expect, however, were the ones that involve not so much a difference of opinion as a differences of fact. For example, I didn’t expect to be having disagreements about whether or not something is wet. I didn’t expect that disagreement at all.
Here’s the scenario: like most people, we only have one clothes dryer in our house. This means that if you want to wash and then dry your “favorite” shirt, all by itself—even though you have been asked repeatedly not to do this because even on the smallest setting it still wastes an incredible amount of water and energy, and what happened to the kid who cried about baby seals when I didn’t cut up the plastic six-pack holders, even though we are 800 miles from the nearest ocean and a baby seal in Flagstaff would have bigger issues to deal with than a plastic six-pack holder?—even if after all that you still want to wash and then dry that one shirt, then you will just have to wait until the clothes that are already in the dryer are actually dry before you pull them out and dump them into a sopping heap on the floor to make room for your one shirt. Even if you absolutely, positively have to have that shirt. And even if the bus is coming down the street right this minute. The clothes must be dry. And by “dry” I mean “not wet.” At all.
This is where the disagreement I failed to anticipate comes in. The disagreement over what is wet and what is dry.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a hypothetical disagreement. This isn’t a Schrodinger’s Cat type of argument, where until you open the dryer the clothes can be both wet and dry. I’m talking about when they are in a dripping pile on the floor.
“Who took these wet clothes out of the dryer?” I’ll ask, and inevitably the culprit, when found, will respond by saying, “I did—but they aren’t wet, they’re dry.” I’ll hold up the article in question and squeeze a little water out onto the floor to prove my point, and yet, instead of responding with, “Oh, I guess I was wrong,” they will continue to insist that the clothes, are in fact, dry.
At this point I am usually left somewhat speechless. Is it possible that they really think that what is wet is actually dry? Is there such a thing as “tactile dysfunction,” and do they suffer from it? I mean, come on, even Helen Keller could tell the difference between “wet” and “dry”—Annie Sullivan had her first breakthrough with her while they were getting water from the well.
Maybe that’s what I need here: the Miracle Worker. She could push the wet clothes into their hands over and over again and repeat “water” until they finally understand.
Or, at the very least, she could put the clothes back in the dryer for me.