Laundry: The Job That Never Ends and Nobody Thanks You For
Laundry in my house is not a chore. It's a climate. It's the weather. It is always happening, it affects everything, and there is no shelter from it.
With six kids, I generate roughly one metric ton of laundry per week. I've done the math. It's not exact math, but it's spiritually accurate.
Here's my system, such as it is: there's the clean pile, the dirty pile, and the mysterious third pile — clothes that are technically clean but lived on the couch for three days, so now they're couch-flavored and must be washed again. You know the pile. Everyone has the pile.
I used to fold everything. Marie Kondo it. Little file-folded drawers of joy. Then I had a fourth kid and realized: the folding was the joy-sucking part. Now? Clean laundry goes in baskets sorted by kid. They can dig. They're young. Digging builds character.
The real villain of laundry day isn't the washing. It's the FITTED SHEET. Who designed this? Who looked at a rectangle of elastic chaos and said “yes, mothers will fold this”? I ball it up. I ball it up with pride. The linen closet doesn't judge me.
And socks. Don't get me started on socks. I buy them in bulk, all the same color, and they STILL disappear. I'm convinced there's a portal in my dryer that leads directly to a sock dimension where single socks live their best lives without us.
Unpopular opinion: the laundry is never “done,” and that's fine. Done is a myth sold to us by detergent commercials. There is only “caught up enough that nobody's wearing a swimsuit to school.”
That's the bar. The bar is: everyone has clean underwear. Everything above that is bonus.
What's your laundry hill to die on? Mine is the fitted sheet ball. Zero regrets.
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