My Life (and Death) with Laundry

The Succulent Wife

By Kristin Fast, Lifestyle Editor and In-House Wit-Cracker

With the rare exception, I do a load or two of laundry everyday… every. Single. Day. We are a family of 5, with two of those five being teenage boys… (teenage boys will wear three shirts in one day, but the same pair of pants for a week) which I am sure makes it clearer why I am engaged in a never ending battle for clean clothes dominance.

I then not only fold the laundry, but also separate it into categories. The shirts, pants, socks are all stacked together and each child comes home from school to a tidy little pile on their respective beds. I even put my husband's things on our bed (on his side, of course). The next step seems rather self-explanatory, no? Everyone should take the 2 minutes to take their pre-folded sorted into categories items and put them away in their closets.

I have, over the years, invested what must be six months of my life into creating organized

closet spaces for my family… The boys are forced to share, so their closet is divided down the middle with shelving for those items which are considered shared… The socks, school sweatshirts, random souvenir tees that people give them but they will never wear outside the house… You get the idea. Then, Jack, my younger boy, has the right side of the closet and Jake the left… Their "nice clothes" are hung on double rods and hooks on the inside of the doors and the rest of the space is quartered off into sections for long sleeve tee shirts/short sleeve tee shirts/shorts/jeans with underwear and socks living in baskets and a rod for jackets… I swear to you, it is so self-explanatory my dogs could follow along.

Eva, my daughter and youngest child, has the luxury of having her own closet and cupboard and I have gone so far as to create individual areas for everything from tank tops to tee shirts that are bedazzled vs. those that are plain… Leggings have their own space as do jean skirts… again, give the dogs a set of thumbs and they would be good to go.

Hugh and I suffer the most from lack of space, and because he isn't a child, and he has therefore forbidden any of my meddling helpfulness in his designated closet area… Mercy! I should throw away one of his 456 tee shirts?

I digress.

I have made it beyond easy to put away the laundry… All my people have to do is simply open their closet and stick the stuff in the already designated space… I'm even open to them just throwing it in there to lie in a heap on the floor. I don't care! Just move it out of my line of sight.

I am sure

most of you know where this is going, in fact, many of you probably live the very same hamster wheel of frustration.Eva's clothes often end up shoved in a small plastic Build-a-Bear armoire. The boys keep their clothes on their bed for days, allowing the piles to grow to dangerous heights… They sleep around the stacks of folded shorts and underwear and eventually everything tumbles or is kicked off and under the bed and then they come to me, annoyed that they don't seem to have any clean underwear. MOM! Didn't you do any laundry???

And my husband?

He moves his piles of clothes to the chair in the corner of our room. And everyday I move those piles back to the bed and I add to them the newly laundered items.And every night he moves the now larger pile back to the chair.And this goes on until I break down and put his things away. And then, the next morning, he will ask me if he has any clean socks.

And then I spontaneously combust from irritation and now I am dead and this post is being brought to you by my ghost. Look for my spirit on upcoming episodes of Ghost Hunters, The World's Most Haunted Laundromats.