Laundry

Today my husband told me he can't find his favorite pair of jeans. We don't have a lot of clothes, so his favorite pair is pretty much his only pair, and he wants them back. He said, "I put them in the wash a long time ago--maybe a week and a half ago--so they must have ended up in (our son's) room."

There was a time when I might have been touched by his assumption that a week and a half is a short time in the world of laundry, his belief that I get through the piles so regularly that he can expect his jeans a day or so after he drops them in a hamper or on the floor. Now, I just roll my eyes. I don't even try to explain, so he continues to believe that the piles of clean laundry somehow get mixed up and his clothes end up in the wrong room and surface weeks later.

There are seven people living in this house and I am the only one who does laundry. (I know I said we don't have many clothes, but we do try to wear clean clothes, so laundry still must be done.) Our oldest daughter sometimes brings her laundry over to our house, too--she starts it herself, but she usually isn't here when the times comes to move it to the dryer, so I frequently finish it because I need the washer. So that's eight people. Plus, my mother-in-law now lives with us. She has Alzheimer's and her pants and bedding sometimes need emergency, immediate trips to the washing machine. I also have a dachshund that pees on the towel in her crate every night, so that has to be washed every day. Stinky stuff like mother-in-law and dog laundry takes precedence over my husband's jeans, so of course it's possible for his pants to sit at the bottom of a hamper for weeks on end. I'm still doing laundry--just not that laundry.

The laundry argument between me and my husband goes way back. We had been married a year or two when the fun of doing his laundry wore off and I tried to back out. I told him he should do his own laundry. The first time I said this, I was frustrated at the piles of undone laundry and wanted to reduce my own work load. He got mad and told me that it wasn't fair for me to wait to announce this new rule until the dirty laundry had piled up. I decided I would finish all the laundry, then tell him he needed to do his own from then on. After I had all the laundry clean and put away, it didn't seem like such a big deal, so I didn't say anything. The laundry would pile up, I'd be frustrated, tell him to do some, and the whole process would repeat. I always thought it was my fault for not being more organized, not his for never stepping in to start doing his own laundry at that point when he was starting with it all clean. He doesn't remember any of this, by the way--at least, the few times I've brought it up, he claims not to remember.

I don't know why I have to do the laundry. I'm like a rat in a maze, following the rules set forth by some unseen power beyond my understanding, trying to be satisfied if now and then I am rewarded by a bit of cheese.