Right-Sizing: Or, I Am Not a Minimalist

Well, the Big House has found a buyer.  Everything that's still in it either comes to the Little House, the storage unit, or out into the world.

In theory, everything except the art on the walls, some of the furniture, and the wedding china could leave my possession.  In theory.

A few years ago, I was participating in a local online-only moms club.  The online-only part is important; women said some of the most amazing, outrageous things under the mighty thin anonymity of a username like "MindyA" or "EllasMom."  Cris-de-coeur like "Am I ever going to get my waist back?" or "At what age did YOUR baby sleep at night?" were interspersed with outrageously personal details about their sex lives, their (or their husbands') DUIs, nanny problems, mother-in-law problems, and requests for gardeners.  And of course, repeated complaints about The Mess.

I doubt I need to explain The Mess.  But since I do need to vent, I will share what our Mess currently consists of:

• Toy cars
• Various jump ropes
• Move debris (books, etc. that had been used for staging but can now come home to Mama)
• Quentin's "Writing Office" where he is conducting his Write On Mamas writing class -- this is a big plastic tool chest thingy with paper & pencils on top.  The boys are numbering all the rooms in the house, except the living room, which has been designated the Write On Mamas Conference Room.  Quentin says he is On Writing Duty.
• Various shoes and dirty socks
• Backpacks
• School work that they are returning for my inspection which I have not yet inspected
• Folded laundry on the couch -- usually it's not folded, but I spiffed the place up for y'all
• Miscelleneous detritis that I'm not willing to admit to

So, every happy family I know has a Mess.  And everybody complains about the Mess.  And it popped up regularly on the forum.  Complaining about the Mess was always a hot topic, with responses usually wordy and ranging from some variation of "don't worry about it, enjoy your kids while they're little" to "I make the kids clean up each type of toy or game before they move on to the next one" (which I personally object to, but probably that person doesn't have items on her Mess list that she won't admit).  

There was one exception, one time.  The response consisted of a single line:

zerowastehome.blogspot.com

Well, that's almost like God sending you a little text message cutting through all that wordy crap and saying "CHECK OUT THIS BLOG."

So of course I did.  

Now, if you are remotely interested in being green, or reducing your waste, you have probably encountered Bea Johnson and her family.  She's been all over the place in the last two years: the Today show, People magazine, the New York Times and Sunset magazine, to name her highest profile appearances (sorry, the link to the Sunset article was password protected; check your library for the December 2010 issue).  I went a little cross-eyed looking at the blog, at first, not understanding if I was seeing what I was really seeing, so then I clicked over to the New York Times article.

That entire article had an impact on me, and it all started with this paragraph:

It’s like some kind of amazing magic trick. Bea has a husband, two sons (ages 10 and 8) and a dog, and yet her household generates no empty containers, no food scraps, no dirty paper towels, no broken toys, no crumpled wrapping paper, no empty ketchup packets from fast-food restaurants, no orphan socks with holes in the toes. 

Nothing.

Ever.

Doesn't that sound beautiful?  Amazing?  Magical, as the article says?

Yes.  Yes, it does.

Imagine a life without the mess.

...

WAKE UP!!


Yes, back to reality.  Back to where Bea Johnson has led where I can't follow.

The thing is, in addition to being nearly zero waste, she's also a true minimalist.  There is a pretty detailed inventory of her house over the course of her blog entries, and it's impressive.

Her house is beautiful.  It's all white, with little pops of orange, which is one of my favorite colors.  And it is, as described, utterly uncluttered.  If you toodle around on her blog you'll find lots of places where she details all the things she got rid of and why she found them unnecessary.

But as I have been packing away many of my belongings, the ones that were used to stage the house and give it personality, I have realized that, although many of those things have little real value, I do find them beautiful.  I am sad to be packing them up with no sense of when I might see them again.

Can I live without the little Fiestaware vase & cherub arrangement that I seem to create in each of my homes?  For sure.  But somehow, seeing the green vase and the cherub holding the (fake) mistletoe ball, which I'm sure Bea Johnson would find too tacky for words, makes me feel... I don't know... at home.  I mean, I've occupied five dwellings in the twelve years that those items have been part of my life, so they certainly have more permanence to me than any building has had.

Can I live without my John Lennon calendar hanging over my desk?  Well, yes.  I have only had it since November (and couldn't even hang it till March, owing to the Big House being staged).  But it calls to mind a set of memories that wouldn't need to surface otherwise: looking at a big painting of John in New York City, priced at $14,000, at some ridiculous store at the Mirage in Las Vegas, laughing with my husband about "maybe someday" -- and then coming back to the hotel room later to find that he'd bought me the calendar, the cover of which is the photo that inspired the painting.  That weekend, when everything was smooth and easy and not distracted by children or house stuff.  It reminds me of how much my husband, who doesn't usually buy me flowers but got the John Lennon calendar and 82% cacao chocolate bars, knows and and loves me.  With all these children and projects, it can be easy to stop noticing that.

Could I  live without my wedding china?  The fruit dishes from Jeff's grandmother?  The brown linen chair with the broken leg?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes again.  Some of it I even want to release into the world.

But somehow, parting with the Big House, and the easy stuff (half our possessions, almost), is enough. I'm beginning to feel a sense of loss.  I don't want to lose momentum on this project, so I think I have done Enough.  I will keep my (number withheld) pairs of shoes, my (too many) skirts and dresses, the (not going to admit) books about Virginia Woolf and the Beatles and England, and each of my children's coming-home-from-the-hospital newborn outfits.

But just because I keep those things today doesn't mean I have to make that same decision tomorrow.

Jane Austen Wrote Pride and Prejudice

A watercolour and pencil sketch of Austen, believed to have been drawn from life by her sister Cassandra (c. 1810)
from Wikipedia

Yes, duh, right?

But think about the simplicity of that sentence: Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice; focus on that verb, wrote.  How long do you think she spent on it?  When you think of Jane Austen in the act of writing, do you imagine her just sitting, steadily composing from "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" to "And they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them" as though she were reading it off the back of her skull into the pen hand?

Photo from The Heroine's Bookshelf

That kind of seamless composition is sort of what's implied in a short little verb like write.  After all, we write grocery lists, emails, notes, and messages all the time, right?  What is Twitter?  Writing (sort of).  And a work like Pride and Prejudice is so normal, 200 years after publication, that it's impossible to imagine it any other way.  (Short plug for one of my favorite authors, Jasper Fforde, who in The Eyre Affair imagines Jane Eyre radically differently, and then, in an insane and creative course of events, returns it to its familiar composition).  So of course she just sat down and wrote it.

Except that she didn't.

According to Wikipedia, Austen began the novel that eventually became Pride and Prejudice in October 1796, at the age of 20.  She completed the inital draft, called First Impressions, in August 1797, having read it to her family along the way.  The Austens were a very literate family, and although I don't have documentation to hand, I know from having read several biographies of Jane Austen that they did not refrain from sharing their opinions about what worked and what didn't as she wrote.  

In November 1797, Austen's father attempted to have First Impressions published, without success.  Jane Austen then set the work aside and continued on other projects, including the epistolary novel Elinor and Marianne into the third-person work that became Sense and Sensibility.  She is not documented as having returned to Pride and Prejudice until about 1811 (although quite a lot about her life is very poorly documented owing to family censorship), and it was published in the form in which we read it today in 1813.  

So what does this have to do with Simply Richer Living?

It has to do with expectations.  

Six words: Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice.  Represents approximately three years of effort.  We don't have any documentation for how long Austen expected to take to write her story.  We don't know if she expected to rank among the great English novelists, or if she wanted to, or what she would have thought of such an achievement -- although we do have enough general indication of her character, and of her attitude towards the Prince Regent, the future George IV, to be able to guess at what she would have thought of that specific ambition.  We don't even really know if she was satisfied with her work, and if not, what she found wanting.  

But I can tell you, I feel very strongly about Pride and Prejudice and especially about my favorite of Austen's novels, Persuasion, which almost moves me to tears at the thought of what we missed at having such a sharp, observant woman die at 41, just when her vision would have been liberated from so many of the trivia things that obsess us in our youth.  

So... not that writing a great (or seven) works of literature is comparable to reducing one's personal footprint in the world and creating a more efficient life, but is it not true that we should expect that any worthwhile work should take some effort, a lot of time, a fair amount of self-doubt and uncertainty, and a lot of iterations before we get all the way to where we want to be.  Or as far as we can reasonably get under the circumstances?  The sentence I need to clean out my house is only seven words.  It includes a phrase, clean out, that implies a one-time endeavor requiring no particular thought (aren't we all engaged in cleaning activities on a daily basis?), and, if we decide on some arbitrary deadline based on a move or a party or houseguests, should be readily achievable in the time allotted.

Think deeper.  Imagine Jane Austen fretting over just how to get Elizabeth to change her mind about Darcy, how miserable she should permit Jane to be, how to balance Bingley between being sweet and easy-going and a complete imbecile.  Imagine her trying to figure out how to make the time between balls pass.  Imagine the uproar in her family when she married Charlotte Lucas to Mr. Collins.  And then, just as Jane Austen did, reach out your hand, and start the process.  Move one step further, and then one more step, acknowledging that it might take multiple iterations to make it what you want, until you have completed the product that is the best you can do with the resources available.  And present it to the world, and be at peace.

Biographies of Jane Austen*:

Jane Austen Her Life and Letters a Family Record by William Austen Leigh (a relative)

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin (my personal favorite)

Jane Austen's Letters by Deirdre LeFaye

Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen Leigh (by her eldest great nephew within the lifetime of nieces and nephews who knew Austen personally)

Jane Austen: Her Life: The Definitive Portrait of Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Art, Her Family, Her World by Park Honan (not one of my favorites, but if you click this Amazon link one of the Amazon reviewers mentions a number of author Austen biographies with which I am not familiar)

Jane Austen: A Life by David Nokes

The Life of Jane Austen by John Halperin

Other Informative Non-Fiction Works:**

Jane Austen: The World of her Novels by Deirdre LeFaye

Jane Austen's World: The Life and Times of England's Most Popular Author by Maggie Lane

The World of Jane Austen by Nigel Nicolson

And if you think you don't like Jane Austen:

Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon (a personal favorite)

*Note that I am not monetized or reimbursed by Amazon in any way; links are provided solely for the convenience of the reader.  These are, for the most part, either biographies with which I am personally familiar or those (Honan, Nokes, and Halperin; I can't remember which of the three I've read already) which are widely acknowledged as having some quality.  As Virginia Woolf observed, "We have lives enough of Jane Austen...", so there are many, many more to choose from, of varying degrees of quality, but this is a good starting list.  For a much shorter, more subjective but very loving memoir of Jane Austen, read the preface to the combined edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which was written by her favorite brother, Henry Austen, shortly after her death.  

**Although these works are not meant to be strictly biographical, they do generally follow many of the events of Austen's life and therefore have biographical qualities.  

Guest Post: Charlotte's Wardrobe Remix

Cindy's Note:  My first guest blogger! Charlotte is my 9 year old daughter.  She has been my go-to wardrobe consultant since she could talk, so for about 8 years.  For our first wardrobe remix, she chose a gray & white striped ruffled t-shirt dress from Old Navy, and then... just dove into her wardrobe.  Here is what she came up with.


The reason that I chose that dress was because I hardly ever wear it and it would be fair to pick clothes that are not from Justice. I picked it because even in the spring and summer it is usually very chilly in Northern California.

This is the dress:

By itself I do not think it looks very cute.  So I put things with it.

I started with...

I took this dress and added a miniskirt and leggings and called it an outfit.  I thought this looked pretty cool, so I kept experimenting.

Another outfit I did is:

This one is my favorite one.  It has a mixture of teenagerish clothes and regular clothes.  I was really surprised to find out that it looked good together.  For school I'll have to wear leggings with it for PE but I'll like it anyways.

I picked this outfit because I like how the dress, the jeans, the sweater, and the shoes go together.  I think mixing prints with stripes looks really cute together.  My Gran gave me this sweater as a Christmas present.

I like this outfit because it feels kind of earthy because of the scarf and the boots.  I think I would probably wear this outfit in the fall and spring because those are the coldest seasons in Northern California.

I like these two outfits because I like how the plaid goes with the stripes, and I like how the shoes go with the entire outfit. I would probably wear this outfit if I were going to the park or a birthday party and doing messy things because it kind of looks like it was meant to get dirty.

I would probably wear this outfit on a typical Northern California day because sometimes it is warm and sometimes it is cold,  and this outfit is perfect for warm and cold weather.  The poncho is good for cold, but then I can take it off and the dress is good for warm.

I hope you liked this blog post! I had fun doing it, and I hope you take some of these ideas and use them in your own closet.

Pinterest and My New Dream Kitchen

My sister-in-law introduced me to Pinterest last Thanksgiving, and I have to admit, at the time I didn't get it.  It was amusing, for sure, but I couldn't understand what anyone would ever use it for.

That was then.  This is now.

Seeing as how we're in the middle of the big transition, downsizing and working out just what we really value in our lifestyle rather than going quite so easily with the flow, it will be many a moon before I'm ready to commit to a kitchen of my own, dream, nightmare, or cookie cutter.  But that doesn't stop me from looking.  Looking at other people's idea of the dream kitchen, that is to say, because at the moment I'm still trying to decide if my rented kitchen should include an automatic breadmaker, and just how bad the oven has to operate to be worth contacting the maintenance people.

Other people's dreams are pretty interesting.

A couple of cousins, for example, who are in their twenties and either living at home or sharing college apartments with friends, are dreaming of something rather grand, like this:

or this:

These are gorgeous kitchens, and if my whole life revolved around gracious entertaining, I'd be all over  kitchens like these.  Especially if I had the money to pay someone else to keep it looking just like the picture.

Alas, real life is not like this.  Small children want to pour their own milk or juice; they want to help make muffins.  They want to fling their lunchboxes on the counter as fast as they can so they can get down to the good part of the day.  A more realistic kitchen (at least, I suppose, for the 99%) looks something like this:

http://www.natschofield.com/2011/03/slightly-crazy-weekend.html

It's a nice kitchen!  No, really!  Can you tell?  It has a pretty up-to-date color scheme with the apple green paint and the printed valance over the window.  It's got some love going with the plants on the windowsill.  They have some very nice pots in hip colors there stacked on the stovetop (those look clean to me, and the stuff that was used seems to be stacked around the sink).  There doesn't appear to be any significant amounts of dried goo stuck to the white cabinets, all the doors of which are closed and appear to be hung properly.  This is a kitchen where people live.

So the question is, when you're using Pinterest, and you actually have a home which needs to be cared for, and you're fortunate enough that the care includes planning for a custom (or mostly custom) remodel, how far do you go to get that 20-something dream so that if or when you're in your 40's you feel like life hasn't totally let you down, and how far do you embrace the practical, throw in the towel, and just build something the kids can't destroy too easily?

I happen to have a very artistic friend who just turned 40 who is in exactly that position.  And the interesting thing about perusing her Pinterest boards, is that she still has very fancy kitchens pinned, but her comments don't say "I want this entire thing."  They say "Love the chalkboard pantry doors." or "trash and recycling chutes to the garage! out of site trash? awesome. want to do this in my mud room when we build it." or my personal favorite for a kitchen from Better Homes & Gardens, "I love the tiles and love the shelves on top of the cabinets instead of the bulkhead."

Which is to say, while it would be lovely to make cookies with the kids in a space like this:

the truth is, the kids always run off as soon as they've eaten all the cookie dough, and there's no staff around to clean up 1500 square feet of splatter.  Except you.  Which is not nearly as much fun as enjoying warm cookies with the grateful masses.

BUT... you don't have to settle for the kitchen from your old college apartment.  Simple and richer work together, no army required.  Jen Jones at iHeartOrganizing.blogspot.com demonstrated this with her own house, as when she took her kitchen from:

to:

http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.com/2010/01/iheart-my-home-home-tour.html

(one reasonable article for determining how to make your kitchen perfect for you is at decorative-design.net)

It's a good thing I don't own my home at the moment, because I am still learning the lessons of my rented kitchen to figure out what I want from my dream kitchen.  The one thing I know for sure is I'd like a bar to park my three wee ones while we make the cookies, eat the cookies, and negotiate how many cookies they can have.  

But please don't ask what I've pinned for my dream laundry room...

HGTV 2011 Dream Home
http://www.hgtv.com/dream_home/hgtv-dream-home-2011-laundry-room-pictures/pictures/index.html

Turned the Page

from MamaManifesto.com

Turned the page on my John Lennon calendar today and found that for the month of May I will be treated to this picture every time I sit at my desk.  He makes my day simply richer by being able to feast my eyes on Beatles-era sweet-tart quality (which I know to be completely posed, but that's OK with me).

The beginning of the month, even a couple of days in, is a nice time to set some new goals for moving forward with my bigger goal of fitting more better stuff into the day.  I've seen several potentially helpful ways to set this up, including:

• Setting up goals for the week (MoneySavingMom.com)
• Having a weekly chore list (iHeartOrganizing.blogspot.com)
• Creating a family control journal (Flylady.net)

I especially like the idea of setting up goals for the week -- taking half an hour over the weekend to plan what I have to do and what I can fit in the small spaces between wife-and-mother obligations.  This is especially important since I'm trying to prepare a piece for my writing group anthology, manage our group membership & accounting tasks, and work on my novel (more on that another time) while ALSO purging and moving the remainder of our belongings out of the 3400 square foot house into the 1470 square foot house without measurably increasing the chaos in our household.

As we're approaching the end of the school year and managing a big move at the same time, I'd like to have a clear eye on my obligations for a bigger chunk of time, to make it easier to break them down week by week.  So here are my goals for May:

Household

• Stay on top of the laundry by doing a load a day, including folding & putting away
• Plan meals for the week, using my calendar, every Sunday
• Do a Flylady-style "home blessing" (much nicer term than clean the house!) once a week
• Pack all the closets and move the surviving decorative items out of the big house before the furniture is moved

Parenting

• Arrange a playdate for my daughter with a friend she's been trying to connect with all year
• Make sure I spend at least 20 minutes of fun time each day with my kids in addition to herding them through all their daily obligations
• Start a new Junie B. Jones book with my six year old

Writing

• Write at least two blog posts per week, including two wardrobe remixes in the month of May
• Spend at least an hour every other day on my novel
• Draft and revise my contribution to the Write On, Mamas! anthology
• Send all invitations to people interested in participating in Write On, Mamas! before May 10th

Stay tuned for the first week of June when I recap my successes and failures for May!  What are your goals and projects for May?

Garbology

"Why are you reading that?" my husband asked.  "It's only going to upset you."

"No, I heard the author on NPR," I said.  "He made some great points and sounded really factual.  It'll be fine."

"I think you're crazy," my husband answered.

He had a point.  I've had more than one meltdown over green guilt in the 4 1/2 years that we've lived in the Bay Area, where going green sometimes feels like a competitive sport.  My anxiety about doing the right thing hit an extended high beginning in February 2010, when I discovered The Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson.  Johnson's family of four produces about a quart of trash annually, and I tried to eat the elephant by jumping in where she was rather than where I am in the whole zero waste householding business.  It made me an exhausted, emotional, self-hating wreck.

I have since scaled back my efforts quite a lot, and our family of five now makes about one kitchen-sized bag of trash per week (but lots of recyclables).  I'm pleased with our progress, but before I determined what our next steps ought to be, I wanted to be better informed about what changes would have the greatest positive impact.   Which is why the NPR interview of Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash caught my attention.

In the interview, Humes was talking about Bakelite, an early plastic that was used for billiard balls, piano keys, and telephones  -- things that were meant to be durable, and have long, even heirloom-length, lives. He was calm and reasoned, not casting blame but describing a shift in the way materials are used as being problematic.  It was impersonal, informative, and assumed intelligence from the audience.

Still feeling cautious, I downloaded a sample onto my Kindle.  Humes opens the book with an anecdote of elderly hoarders, Jesse & Thelma Gaston, who had been trapped in their own home, by their own trash, for three weeks.  He moves further into the story of trash by describing other hoarders, the condition of hoarding, and the media attention it has received in the last few years.  His punchline is startling:

But little if any thought is given to the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly.

Of course, there's a reason for this blind spot: namely, the amount of junk, trash, and waste that hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal.  It's just that most of us hoard it in landfills instead of living rooms, so we never see the truly epic quantities of stuff that we all discard.  But make no mistake: The two or three years it took the Gastons to fill their house with five to six tons of trash is typical for an American couple.  (page 3/location 106)

He follows this assertion with a discussion of how much trash the average American generates daily, coming up with an average lifetime production of 102 tons of trash.  There is a reasonably detailed discussion of how one estimates that amount, and multiple illustrations for how much 102 tons really is.    Aircraft carriers are involved.  Which is kind of scary, when you are talking about one person's trash.

Humes then poses three questions:  What is the nature and cost of that 102-ton monument of waste?  How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realize they are doing it? Is there a way back from the 102-ton legacy, and what would that do for us... or to us? (pages 11-12)  These three questions form the organizing principles of the book.

Part 1: The Biggest Thing We Make describes how America deals with trash, how it has been dealt with in the past, and some "paths not taken" in the history of American waste management.  He talks about the concept of waste and wastefulness, how our natural sense of thrift was overcome by early mid-century advertisers (fans of Mad Men might find this familiar territory), and how the political climate defeats promising policies.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is discussed in (rather depressing) detail.  Humes corrected my misconception, a common one, he asserts, that the Garbage Patch (not to mention the other gyres collecting plastic trash in the other oceans) is not an "island" of trash, but a chowder of plastic bits with floating detergent bottles and milk cartons and old toys floating around what ought to be a pristine blue surface thousands of miles from anywhere.

Part 2: The Trash Detectives was perhaps the most depressing section of the book.  It's the shortest, because it's the area involving the greatest number of unknowns.  It goes against what we might assume, that "someone out there" knows what happens to the cans we put in the recycling, or the printer cartridges that we drop off at Office Depot, but in fact there is not really a clear, readily followable chain for where stuff goes when we're done with it (except the landfill) as there is for how to get it into our hands.  Humes does a great job of detailing exactly what is and is not known about trash after its useful life, and although the information itself is depressing, his prose never is.  It's informative and occasionally incredulous, but always readable and factual; he is one of us, which is to say, he doesn't exempt himself from the problem.

Part 3: The Way Back was... maybe not so much empowering, given how thoroughly Humes detailed the scope of the problems our trash poses, but certainly hopeful.  "Pick of the Litter" details a San Francisco dump and artist-in-residence program that talks about how much is found in the dump, but also how much potential there is for the stuff in there as actual materials.  "Chico and the Man" recounts the efforts of a small entrepreneur to create a new kind of reusable shopping bag, and to educate people on the environmental benefits of avoiding plastic shopping bags -- and the gigantic lawsuit that was mounted against him by the plastic bag industry -- and how it was defeated.  The remainder of the section talks about the efforts communities around the world and one Marin County, California family of four (Bea Johnson's family) has been working to reduce their waste, one innovative idea at a time.

If you're interested in treading lightly on the Earth, this book will be interesting and informative.  If you've never thought about it before, it's a reasonable place to start; Humes makes a very good case for remaking ourselves into a less wasteful culture as being good for us personally, as well: with less stuff, and better stuff, we can do more, save more, be financially more secure and nationally more secure.  The materials we have in our landfills are resources we've paid for and then discarded as though they are valueless.  Humes makes a powerfully readable case for the value of our resources, and for renewing our natural tendency to thrift.

Laundry is My Emmamy

At the very end of 2009 the obligatory Facebook app made the rounds, summing up a year's worth of posts with cloud labels.  Coming off a high-low year that contrasted the demands of running a household with three children aged six and under with the incredible experience of training for and completing the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3 Day, I installed it.  I expected to relive all the satisfaction of the work I did for the 3 Day, something that reflected my hard work and success.  Which I did.

But the mentions of the laundry were a lot huger.

I'm going to backtrack a bit to a Cute Thing My Kids Said a couple of days ago.

Me, serving dinner: "Quentin, would you like any grape tomatoes?"

Quentin (age 4), looks up: "No." Looks back at his plate.  No expression.

Duncan (age 6), astounded: "But why not?  They're the most delicious things ever!"

Quentin, deadpan: "Vegetables are my emmamy."

Which is it, in one.  Laundry is my emmamy.

Now, I do try not to be Debbie Downer on Facebook.  So I use little euphemisms, like "I'm off to tackle Mount Washmore!" because it really was the most interesting thing going on in a day that is typically filled with various potty responsibilities and the making of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Also, I think just lurking is sneaky and Facebook was, at that time, pretty much my only adult interaction for days on end.  On a really good day I might post "Mount Washmore is a molehill!" but by the next morning somebody would have wet the bed and I'd be in silent despair as I contemplated the loads of bedding to be dealt with.

I don't expect many men to have made it this far into the SAHM's lament, but just in case my husband's eyes haven't yet glazed over, and also to enumerate the pain of fellow laundry haters, I will spell out exactly why I loathe a job that is primarily done by two (mostly) automatic machines.

First is sheer volume.  In my household there are two adults, three children, and a cat.  Now, though I don't actually dress my cat, he does generate more than his share of laundry... if you get my drift.  He's old and not as spry as he used to be and, like the children in 2009, he doesn't always get there in time.  Which is fun.  I expect the rest of the family is self-explanatory, but what it all amounts to is that there is a lot of laundry and it's generally very disgusting, especially in 2009, when my children were 6, 3, and 1.

Second is my own idea of a job well-done.  Apparently there are a lot of ways to separate laundry (one friend divided them into "whites, reds or pinks, and everything else") and I use one of the more elaborate systems, involving not only color but fabric care. So nobody else is allowed to separate the laundry but me.

Third is the amount of time the machines take and the nature of parenting.  The washing machine takes just under an hour, but the dryer takes just over an hour.  This means that if I start the washer and the dryer at the same time, the washer will have to sit, completed, till the dryer finishes.  Except, if I put a load of line-dry only clothes in, I can squeeze two loads into the washer before I have to move the second one over to the dryer, so theoretically I get more done.  Except, when you are the only adult in the house reponsible for three children under six, inevitably there's going to be some reason to forget that you are supposed to go back and move everything over, and you certainly can't babysit the machines when you have to prevent the children from killing each other, or poisoning themselves, or when you have to fetch them from school or take them to baseball practice or... take your choice.  Children are distracting... as is Facebook.

Then there's the folding... the endless, monotonous folding.  It's not so bad when I can watch a lot of TV while I'm working at it, but I can't really watch TV while the children are around if I don't want their brains to rot in their heads and leak right out of their ears, so I inevitably end up taking 2 nights a week with a gargantuan mound of laundry next to me and watch something like 4 episodes of Star Trek Voyager until I get it all done.  Which is fine, I guess, although we are now a one-TV household and my husband really likes his xBox.

I won't talk about lugging it all around to the five rooms in the house where it is all stored.

Are you tired yet?

So in 2010, when my youngest son was 2 1/2 and we judged that my parents wouldn't hate us if they kept the three children while my husband and I took a long weekend to ourselves, we went to stay at a resort in Jamaica.  We went there to sit on the beach and just rest.  I exerted myself far enough to get a pedicure.  While I was at the salon, just me and the aesthetician, there was a terrible thunderstorm and the power went out.  She opened all the windows and we had enough light for her to keep working.  It was quiet, really, really quiet, and peaceful, and she was a very beautiful woman.  Not magazine beautiful, but character beautiful.  Someone you could really like.  And in that peaceful setting, with her working on my feet, we got to talking like women, sharing about our families (she had two teenage daughters) and how things were in Jamaica, which at that time was experiencing a lot of unrest in Kingstown, on the other end of the island.  (Now that I think about it, I don't know how or if or when that worked out, and I'm a little ashamed).

She said, "Three children, that's a lot of work."

And I, feeling rested and relaxed after two and a half days of enough sleep and nobody begging me for anything, said, "Yes, they are a lot of work.  But they're a lot of fun, too.  The laundry is the worst part."

She was surprised and we got to talking about laundry.  She never even thought of it as a chore, she said, because nobody has a washing machine, let alone a dryer, you just wash all your clothes in a tub, and it takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes.  You put it out on the line and a couple of hours later you bring it in and that's all there is to it.

So it got me wondering.  Has our labor-saving device turned what could be a short, quick job into something that requires hours of thought and effort?  If I did all my laundry in the bathtub instead of in a high efficiency front loader would I be able to make peace with that chore?

But then I look at Mount Washmore.  And I think of putting all that in a tub, and scrubbing it by hand, and hauling it out to the clothesline my neighborhood won't permit me to have, and how long it would take to dry in the San Francisco Bay Area fog belt even if I had one, and I think, not bloody likely.

So, laundry is, and shall remain, my emmamy.