Cinderella, Cinderella

My absolute most despised chore to do is laundry, which is unfortunate, because we go through a lot of clothes at our house. How? I am not sure. We are just two people, who change outfits a reasonable amount of times, yet somehow there is always a heaping pile of clothes waiting to be laundered.

 

The whole process is exhausting. First, I have to collect clothes from every room in our home, because my husband thinks that going on a scavenger hunt for dirty laundry is my very favorite game. Next, there is the sorting, which is quite the complicated system - Is blue a dark or a bright? Does the one white shirt Ryan owns go in with the greys or does it need bleach? Do my black and white pajama bottoms with the maroon drawstring go in with the darks, even though the matching maroon tank top obviously goes in with the brights? - it is an endless sea of confusion and grey area, and nothing about my personality does well with grey areas unless it happens to be a load of laundry consisting of solid grey pieces.

 

All of this madness has to take place before schlepping it downstairs (which requires moving the dog gate and herding said dog downstairs with me, because if left unattended for any amount of time, she will eat an entire loaf of bread - bag included. She comes by that one honestly, though I am civilized enough to not eat the plastic.) and actually starting the laundry. Once the clothes are loaded and the machine is going, it means that I have a solid 40 minutes to completely forget about starting a load of laundry. I have resorted to having to set an alarm on my phone to remind me that if I don't check on the state of the laundry, we will have nothing clean to wear. Otherwise, our clothes live in a 3 - 5 day cycle of being washed three times before being transferred and then dried multiple times over the remaining days until we literally run out of clean clothes. Downstairs is very far away, and I am incredibly lazy.

 

After they are sufficiently washed and dried, I have gathered approximately 12 guitar picks from the dryer (every. single. time!), and I have collected the clothes before they are ice cold and wrinkled, the worst part begins. Placing a soft, warm pile of clean clothes on my lap instantly makes me want to take a nap, until my skin is scorched by a 900* jean button. The only aspect of the actual folding that I loathe is the pairing up of socks...it may be the figurative straw that one day breaks this OCD patient's back. Seriously - where do they go?? It's like a living math problem that has no answer - 10 pairs of socks go into the washer and dryer, but only 7.5 pairs come out - solve for 'x'. I keep thinking that one of these days, a rapture will take place in the dryer and I will be the savior of the missing socks that spill out and plead to me to return them to their unmatched friend who has sat in a pile on top of our dresser for three months. No such day has transpired as of yet, so the tower of lonely socks atop our bedroom furniture remains.

 

I get them folded and laid out to hang just fine, but my will to live is destroyed at the very thought of having to actually put them away. What happens more often than not is that we fish clean items out of the basket each day until it is time to start another load of laundry and I need the basket, so I finally break down and put the remaining clothes away.

 

It's pathetic, I know, but believe it or not, people aren't lining up at my door begging to do my laundry for me. As I recently saw someone post on social media, 'I don't care that Disney lied to me about Prince Charming*. I'm more upset about forest creatures and their unwillingness to clean my house.'

*I love my husband dearly, and given a thousand lifetimes to do it over again, I would pick him every time. I'm just saying, it would be nice if the gig came with a crown and a staff of servants, or at least a couple chipmunks who vacuum.