For those of you who follow this blog on a semi-regular basis, you may have noticed that I did not win the Powerball yet -- in spite of my valiant efforts. It's up to $80 million now. Oh, lordy, what I could do with $80 million. Like pay off my student loans. Like pay someone to paint the trim in my house, so I could finally peel the tape off the walls -- after it's been up there for over a year. Like pay someone to do my laundry, and best of all, put it all away.
When I lived in New Orleans, I used to pay a woman named Margarita to wash my skivvies and anything else I dirtied. Looking back on it now, I had no business paying someone to do my laundry since I was so poor at the time that I had to sell my plasma on a regular basis just to eat. There are a lot of household chores I despise, and therefore mostly ignore, but when you have a baby, you cannot ignore the laundry.
As a college and graduate student, I owned enough pairs of underwear that I only needed to wash my clothes once a month -- at which point, I would lug approximately 700 pounds of filthy clothing down to Margarita and a few hours later, I would pick it up and schlep it all home. It was always perfectly folded and beautifully washed, but there was one big problem with it. Margarita didn't come home with me to put my clothes away. Thus, they remained in the clothes basket Margarita put them in until I put them on my body.
In Chicago, I paid a Chinese woman named Ming to do my laundry for me. And Ming delivered. But god damn Ming to Hell, she also didn't come in and put my laundry away. Though I suspect that if I had asked, she might have. Again, all of the clean laundry just remained in the basket until I put it on to wear. My laundry baskets (yes, I own six of them) are equivalent to large dressers.
In Montana, there are no barely English-speaking minorities for me to exploit, so before we got married, Brent did all of the laundry. But that bastard didn't put any of it away either.
Now that we have Mikey, we do about two loads of laundry a day. When he was younger, and spewing whatever food he had consumed all over me, him, and anything within a 20-yard radius, we probably averaged 4 loads of laundry a day. The amount of laundry you do when you have a child can only be described as completely obscene.
And the amount of laundry that piles up when you don't ever put it away is something beyond obscene; it might be described as criminal. I have piles of clothes stacked about eight feet high in my laundry room and on a nearly daily basis, I say, "I've got to put that laundry away today." But days come and go, the tide ebbs and flows, and the laundry pile keeps growing taller. Brent says that he doesn't know where anything goes and uses that as his excuse not to put the laundry away. I suppose that might be true, but at some point here, it doesn't really matter where things go because our closets and dressers will be completely empty since all of our clothes will be downstairs piled haphazardly on top of every available flat surface in the laundry room.
Truth be told, I don't put anything away. It's not that I'm a slob; it's just that I feel really annoyed by having to put things back. I don't file anything at work, because, quite frankly, I hate filing. And god damn it -- that's what secretaries are for. I am a profesional dish stacker, and can stack dishes in our little clean dish drainer seven feet in the air before I succumb to putting anything away. I actually don't mind washing the dishes or the clothes or even folding them, and I even create files for things at work. I just can't bring myself to do that last step.
I wonder why that is. I like to think it's because I have other things I like to spend my time on. But truthfully, it's more because I despise putting things away. Mikey likes putting things back. He has been playing with crayons the last few days, and when he's done, he puts them all back in the box one by one. It takes him longer to put the crayons back than the amount of time he has spent playing with them. He also hangs out with me in the kitchen -- where I leave all of the drawers pulled out and the cupboards open as I cook -- and he walks behind me and closes everything he can reach. Do the piles of laundry drive my little neatnik up the wall? When he visits my office, does he feel like rolling his eyes to the sky, and saying, "Mom -- get a grip. FILE something before you get swallowed alive in here, for chrissakes."
