...its epic, isn’t it?

That blissful moment when you catch yourself and realize…it isn’t the nudge of spring (don’t get me started on Mother Nature, clearly she was out too late last night). It’s not that world peace is near…not that all of the kids are asleep…not that you have mastered liquid eyeliner at the age of 41. The one quiet moment when you realize…you have all of the laundry caught up. It is a glorious feeling, so glorious so when I caught myself realizing it, I had to sit down and share…because it won’t probably last for more than an hour or so.

My life is filled with laundry…mine, theirs and at times the random Lego or action figure. I used laundry as an ever-present escape for a while, going to the basement to lug/fold/pretreat, time alone to my thoughts and the monotonous action of keeping my offspring clean looking and not smelling. As children grow, so do their clothes and this one time escape became almost an upper body workout of lugging, folding and pretreating. When my oldest children like to have about 4 wardrobe changes a day…not because they have that delicious B. O. that for some reason I can only smell, I went on strike. But I’ll get to that.

Then Mother Nature. As I afore mentioned, clearly she was tying one on last night, as we went from 60 degrees to a real-feel-temp of 22. Really? Just yesterday my children were cheering my name, honestly cheering, as they woke up in the morning because I declared it was a “short day”…obviously our kicks come easy around here. This morning? I was suddenly, enemy number one. Okay, well whatever you are all learning in your science classes at school? Yeah, the jig is up…that’s right, I CONTROL THE WEATHER…just one more perk of my “smother” title. But back to the bliss…

I miss the days of school uniforms. Polo shirt, khaki pants, white socks and done. The most I had to do was put them out and they would do the rest. But when you have a child, who thankfully buys most of his own clothes, but steadily mentions, “…um, that sweatshirt belongs on the gentle cycle, 20 minutes in the dryer with a dry towel and then hung to dry…”. UM….WHAT? I am sorry, I am not your maid or your entertainment director on this cruise ship of life. When it comes to laundry, I don’t sort, I don’t bleach and everything in the dryer if you are not of voting age. That is when the strike began.

Now, my OCD when it comes to life is sometimes like a mole on a person’s face. You see it, you know it is there, but eventually you don’t even notice it because of their sparkling personality or dazzling wit. So laundry was, my monkeys- my circus. But then, in hind sight quite symbolically, on Martin Luther King Day, it hit me…I want to declare, I need to declare, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last…” And the craziest thing happened…it worked. Now we tweaked some things, I’ll be damned if I let a kid wash four things and call that a full load! I collect or ask for collection. I don’t sort. I wash everything together. And the only special attention goes to the ladies in the house and their unmentionables…because that crap isn’t cheap.

It took about a month but a strange realization set in. Suddenly, a few people in my house began to realize that the laundry is like a 24 hour factory, without the OSHA check-ins and the union meetings. Why were they folding laundry so often? How was it possible? They just folded laundry yesterday. As they were asking this, most appropriately it was cocktail time and as I answered them, looking over my cocktail, I responded with, “Welcome to my LIFE…its epic, isn’t it?”

Now, just to be clear, I’m not running a sweat shop out of my home. I just know that at times I’m spread thin, and any little task, otherwise known as a chore on the mean streets of America, that can offset my most convincing “Mommy Dearest” impression is for the greater good. And it was good. It was bliss. Did I mention that it is an early-out today? Someone walked in the back door, and immediately put something in the washing machine…nice while it lasted.