The Laundry Confession

Plus The Bookshop Book Club, Week 3

No, this is not the title of the most boring Robert Ludlum novel ever. I confess that I genuinely enjoy doing laundry.

If only everyone’s laundry room were this scenic. I took this photo at Schiltalp, above Mürren, Switzerland.

I recognize that this is not a common opinion, and that most people agree with the lady in this cartoon:

You might prefer a squishy monster to a heap of laundry. Nonetheless, I’d like to make the case that laundry and other ordinary, necessary tasks of life can actually be rather pleasant. This attitude to chores not only makes us happier, but also improves family harmony.

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But first . . .

The Bookshop Book Club

If you’re just joining us, you can catch up here: Introduction, week 1, and week 2. On to this week’s reading!

Florence’s bookshop continues to be plagued by misfortunes. Christine causes a fracas when she gives Mrs Gamart a smart rap on the knuckles to punish her for jumping the line; Mrs Gamart’s relative assumes that “silence means consent” and attempts to impose his watercolors on Florence; and the authorities investigate Florence for employing a child, even though “Christine, like a large proportion of the Primary School population of Suffolk, is, as [they] very well know, ‘helping out.’”

Mr Brundish invites Florence to tea, praises her courage, and gives Lolita his imprimatur. The book turns out to be wildly popular, but the crowds outside the shop give Mrs Gamart a pretext for suing Florence, and the other shopkeepers become dangerously jealous of Florence’s success. We also learn that Mrs Gamart’s nephew has pushed through a bill that “empowered local councils to purchase compulsorily . . . any buildings wholly or partly erected before 1549 . . . for the cultural recreation of the public.” Uh oh.

Some discussion questions:

• What do you make of Mr Brundish?

• Do you think there is anything Florence could do to placate and propitiate Mrs Gamart?

• Parts of chapter 8 are told in letters. Why do you think Fitzgerald made this choice?

• What is going on with Milo and Kattie’s relationship? Do you think Florence is correct in thinking Kattie is being nice “to show [Milo] how kind she could be to a dull middle-aged woman”?

• What would it be like to grow up in a family that had as its motto, “Not to succeed in one thing is to fail in all”?

For next week, let’s finish the book (chapters 9 and 10). I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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Meditation or Distraction

I am by nature an orderly person, which is why I enjoyed volunteering every week for twelve years shelving books in my kids’ school libraries. It’s satisfying to follow a system and bring order to chaos. This applies to laundry too. I take a great big mess of clothes, sort it into neat piles according to color and fabric, run it through the machines, fold everything up neatly, recategorize the clothes by who owns what, and restore everything to its proper place.

Laundry also delights the senses. Really! There’s the whoosh of the washer and the reassuring tumble of the dryer (although I could do without the pesky beeping when the load is done), the fresh aroma of the clean fabrics, and—especially—the warmth of towels straight from the dryer. Even the way the dryer lint peels away in one piece is immensely appealing. Household chores often have this repetitive, meditative aspect, if we’re willing to acknowledge it.

But if we truly dislike laundry (or any other chore), we can also distract ourselves. My husband, Matt, would point out that I use laundry as an excuse to listen to podcasts. Guilty as charged! One of my favorites is Search Engine with PJ Vogt. All the episodes are fantastic, but why not start with the first, Wait, should I not be drinking airline coffee?

The Strict Laundry Person Principle

Many years ago, a former friend, whom I’ll call Rachel,¹ asked me to water her plants while she was away for the week. Of course! Happy to help! Then she said she had to explain her plants to me—which should have been a red flag. Turns out that Rachel owned about fifty plants, each of which had a bespoke watering method. Some plants needed water every day, while others would be destroyed if water so much as touched them. Some plants were watered in the dishes below their pots, others by delicately misting the air around them, or by slowly dripping water onto an exquisite system of cotton strings leading into the dirt. Some plants needed to be taken into the bathroom and given a shower, while others needed a sponge bath. Nowadays we would call Rachel a Plant Mom, but I thought she was nuts. I came over one time and watered every plant the normal way, and they all survived.

My point is that while, yes, there is such a thing as weaponized incompetence, it is also possible to be too persnickety about household chores. When this is the case, we will be happier if we allow others to do things their own way. Or, if we just can’t bear the idea of a (to our minds) half-assed job, we ought to do the chore ourselves instead of badgering our loved ones to come up to snuff.

I call this the Strict Laundry Person Principle in honor of my mom. My mom always does the laundry, because she has her own system for sorting the wash into half a dozen or so categories,² and she doesn’t want anyone to mess anything up. Which is fair! Similarly, in our family I do all the laundry not only because I enjoy it, but also because Matt is an extremely Lax Laundry Person. He doesn’t sort the laundry but instead throws everything together into a single, jam-packed load. (Matt jokingly protests, “I DO sort the laundry! I put the dirty clothes in the machine and leave the clean ones where they are!”)

The Strict Laundry Person Principle is generalizable. Think of the dishwasher battles that rage in every family. For example, here is a typical example of how I load the dishwasher:

By European standards, this is an extra-large dishwasher. I miss American appliances!

I think this is perfectly fine, but Matt, who has the spatial-reasoning ability of a mathematician (which is what he is), can cram in about three times as much. In fact he thinks that I am searching for a single object that can be loaded into the dishwasher such that it is impossible to put in anything else.³ But we have decided that we would prefer not to bicker about the dishwasher, and so whoever is on dishwasher duty loads it as s/he sees fit, unafflicted by kibitzing or nitpicking.

The other day some online friends were discussing Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play system. Rodsky’s commendable goal is to help couples divide up chores more evenly, including the mental load of running a family. On the one hand, it is frustrating that our culture shunts the work of organizing and monitoring family chores onto women, because there is nothing preventing men (or, for that matter, kids) from noticing what needs doing and just doing it.

Source.

On the other hand, perfectionism about chores can erode relationships. Apparently,⁴ one couple using Fair Play is close to divorce because the husband mops the floors once a week instead of every other day as his wife prefers, and she can’t stop criticizing him about it. My first thought was, “Do these people not have a dog to lick the floors clean for them?” But seriously, who mops every other day? Are their floors really that filthy?

Lynn would be happy to lick your kitchen floor clean too.

Choose Your Hard

When it comes to the meticulousness or lack thereof in how our family members carry out household tasks, we have three choices: We can browbeat our loved ones until they change their evil ways and do the task precisely to our liking, we can let it go (like Matt with the dishwasher), or we can graciously take over the task ourselves (like me with the laundry). Whichever path we choose imposes a cost. We may be keenly aware of the cost of having to do a chore ourselves because no one else does it right, but we tend to forget that squabbling with family members has a cost too. To paraphrase that meme, doing chores is hard; constant arguments and resentment are hard. Choose your hard.

We will be better off if we can find pleasure in small, everyday tasks. If that’s impossible, we can at least seek out distractions as we check another item off our list. And for those really unpleasant chores, well, they are an inevitable part of life, so let’s grumble and sigh—and then get on with it. After all, laundry, like the Force, will always be with us.

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How about you, readers? Is there a chore that we’re supposed to hate that you secretly like? And which chore do you dislike most of all? (It’s vacuuming, isn’t it? Ugh. Vacuuming is the WORST.) Who does which chores in your family, and why? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Maybe podcasts aren’t your jam. Music works too! When faced with a disagreeable task, I sometimes listen to eighties’ tunes (yes, I am old) and turn the drudgery into a dance party. Try this one:

1. There is a whole saga about Rachel. Perhaps it will be a topic for a future post.

2. For example, did you know that Norwex cloths have to be washed separately from other fabrics or they pick up bits of lint? I didn’t. Oops.

3. Matt adds: “It’s not that I think it. I observe it!”

4. I had hoped that this story was apocryphal, but nope. You can find it in the comments to this article by Cindy DiTiberio.

It’s not even the worst example in the article of how excessive stringency destroys relationships. DiTiberio cites the following as one reason she divorced her husband: When he took their daughter for her flu shot, he chose the nasal mist instead of the injection because their daughter has a needle phobia. DiTiberio comments, “I couldn’t believe it. The point was to go and make her do it! And he’d failed at even that.”