🧺 Why There Are Crumpled Laundry Piles All Over My House, Part One
Pinterest boards should come with a disclaimer, at least when they’re depicting light-drenched impeccably-appointed home interiors:
***You will not achieve the harmony of this monumental adulting accomplishment—or anything close—if you and/or your spouse are not obsessively neat.
Yesterday, I felt proud of myself, at least until I got home.
I got dressed (check!), sat in a hidden leather recliner at my favorite bookstore-cafe in midtown where I responded to emails (check!), went to a meeting at a celebrated media organization nearby, worked from another cafe afterward to process the notes, then took an “express” forty-minute Pilates class before heading home in the pouring rain (check check check!).
When I walked in the door, I came upon a familiar sight: clothes crumpled in piles, as far as the eye could see:
On the kitchen counter (why?! how?)
On the kitchen counter’s high-top stools, elegantly curved seats rendered invisible
Covering the bench by the front door, formerly for putting on shoes
Cluttering the floor by the Peloton after falling off the aforementioned stools, and
Sweaters and jackets strewn atop our two blue La-Z-Boy recliners according to whose-clothes-upon-whose-chair.
This is to say nothing of the carry-on suitcase down the hall that I still haven’t unpacked from my speaking trip two weeks ago, my alarmingly high piles teetering nearby, the raggedy once-folded stacks falling over in the hall closet designated for me behind it, or the clean clothes still sitting rumpled in the dryer negating all freshness from my initial effort to launder them.
When embarking upon cohabitation, They™️ don’t tell you how fast the rate of clothing chaos accelerates if you live with someone who isn’t neater than you. This is magnified when chaos also happens to be core to their creativity, to the point where they don’t notice it and aren’t bothered by it.
You can ask your partner to pick up the not-yet-dirty-enough-to-go-in-the-bin socks that are strategically thrown toward the piles of shoes, but Byron Katie would also say:
If you’re the one noticing them, and they bother you, and you want inner peace more than festering resentment, it might be best for you to pick them up yourself instead of leaping straight to nagging or blame. I Need Your Love, Is It True? Could also be titled, I Need You To Pick Up Your Socks, Is It True? (Yes. And Good Luck).1
The Personal Development Police (I should update this to Optimization Influencers) like to say, “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” But I have a bone to pick with this phrase. As I write in Free Time:
How can that be true when the work you most enjoy lights you up so much that you could immerse yourself for hours, forgetting to eat and reluctantly peeling yourself away only for bio breaks?
Contrast that with the work you dislike most: you drag yourself to your desk and muster your limited willpower, only to apply yourself to a task you dread, yielding only passable results.
On the one hand, my laundry piles could be a visual reflection of the greater chaos in my life and psyche. (Fine, point taken, it’s not entirely untrue.)
They could represent the need to delegate—to find a “Who who isn’t you”—except that we’d need a live-in laundry picker-upper to keep pace with our 24/7 clothing-entropy rate.
They could also signify my failures as a trad wife (and why I sometimes want another one)2 or the successes of feminism that have allowed Millennial Me to unhook from definitions of goodness based on the quality or quantity of my domestic labor.
I choose to be the primary breadwinner instead. This allows me to serve in ways best suited to my strengths, for the highest good for all of us.3
❤️
Continue reading part two, where I share my thoughts on 🥓 bringing home the bacon, and whether I truly think my “triage system of not tidying until I want to scream is working.”
Hopefully your partner is also self-aware enough to notice that you seem much happier when clothes are not scattered about, and therefore even though you’re busy Byron Katieying, they are also busy tidying. Even if it’s just for you. I loved the book, Why Talking Is Not Enough, that makes this point brilliantly in a way I had never heard before.
The phrase “I want a wife” became famous in Judy Brady’s 1971 essay for Ms. Magazine (PDF). I used to joke about this, but I stopped because I don’t even like associating the word “wife” with (unpaid) domestic labor when it can mean so many other things.
Let me be clear: I am terrible at many “wifely” duties because they are so hard, for me. No matter who tackles them, these tasks are essential, important, and challenging to juggle.
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I want to push back gently on footnote 2, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but where you write "...I am terrible at many wifely duties...", I would posit that there are no "wifely duties" anywhere -- there are simply duties that must be done in a home, and some of them need to be done by the adults present in that relationship (some can be done by children present, if there are any). The more we ascribe to the language of there being "wifely duties" that exist as fact, the more it is reinforced. This language and usage has been handed down by older generations and by the patriarchal system, but it's up to us all to stop using it and accepting it as having any meaning. Again, mine is a gentle pushback with respect as I love your work and your writing and your heart. (And I'm much older and married far longer and this is a matter that I am constantly working against in my own marriage, and I watch my female friends and relatives in their marriages also battle these generationally engrained beliefs that certain adult responsibilities have a gender attached to them).
“How you do one thing is how you do everything.”
I don't even do all the stages of my laundry the same! Separating, treating, washing, and unloading I'm more than happy with. I don't even mind putting away folded laundry, a lovely sense of satisfying completion to the chore.
But I would rather be dragged naked through a chunnel filled with thumbtacks than have to stand (or sit) and tediously fold every. single. frickin. piece. of. laundry! So the piles form, a bottleneck of frustrating resentment of my own making. Grrr.