As I sit here folding laundry it occurred to me that that life is like laundry… Sometimes its clean, sometimes its dirty and sometimes its in chaos.  It could be folded neatly, hung beautifully like in the all pictures dedicated to organizing a closet.  Or it can be in heaping piles hiding away in the closet, dirty and stained.  Our Laundry life paints a pretty good picture of our own internal battles that we struggle with every day.

I love how one minute every piece of clothing can be sorted, hung, organized neatly put away and in the fleeting next moment the clothes are all over the floor drooping out the basket. Piles on the top of the washer and drier.  Piles in the closet.   My daughters socks are in ever corner of the house and between every cushion of the couch.  To add to it she can never seem to find the laundry baskets, or the washing machine. Her dirties end up all over the floor in every room of the house, shirt over there, underwear attached to pants over there and if we are lucky, her underpants might make it to the washer, most of the time if I don’t get them picked up in time, my chocolate lab finds them delicious and eats them.  Yes he has a fetish.

My baby’s dirty clothes end up on top of my clean shirt that laid down to hang up but I got side tracked and now the wet soiled clothes have literately  pooped on my favorite clean shirt.  My husband washes his daily because of work, but not before they end up on the side of the bed not making it to the hamper in the least.  But he washes them.  My teenager…I should not get started here.  Everyone knows how that goes.  My teenager has more clothes than my daughters, my husbands and mine; it seems his clothes spend more time on the floor of his bathroom.  The clean ones spend even more time unfolded,  slung across the floor with no hope of ever finding their way to a drawer or a hanger.   I have two other children that do however manage to get their dirty clothes in their baskets with pride every time and they still have matching pairs of socks.  There is a glimmer of hope.   I just looked in my closet (the whole reason I am writing this post) and thought to myself… I have not seen a pile that high in ten years  (single life habits).  I went way back on this one!  I am still shaking my head.

I have a sign hanging above my laundry room entrance: LAUNDRY: Sorting out life one load at a time.  Lord have mercy there is more wisdom in this one saying then I ever thought possible.  Here I am sitting at the kitchen table, my pile of clean laundry dumped on the table, catching up and it hits me that life like laundry.  Its clean one minute, dirty the next, and we spend so much time washing, drying, hanging, folding putting it away all for it to get dirty again.  It just like life, some times we get so backed up that we feel overwhelmed, sometimes we are so good at just doing it everyday (god bless those people)  that it makes you shine as bright as the sun, and some of us can never find the joy in the clean clothes because we know the impending doom of whats to come anyway.

Every day is a delicate balance.  The dirty piles equal being overwhelmed, the clean neat piles are equal to happiness.  The urgency to get caught up is where the balance tips between clean and dirty.  The balance is in the “follow through.”  We tend to get so caught up in the ‘tackling’ that we forget to try and balance it out with a simple easy mantra to follow… “a load a day keeps the lorazepam away”… of course there always that fleeting moment when you want to toss it all out the back door pour gasoline on it and light that shit on fire.  Sometimes facing it “tackling” it, is just what we have to do with life.  One load, one problem at a time.  We have to tackle the hard stuff when its coming at us full force and other time times we make the field goal with ease.  No matter what we have to do it every day.  We have to face the world every day.

The struggle between doing it and facing it are harder for some than others.  We have to find balance in our lives knowing that we will be facing the laundry piles every day whether we want to or not.  The sunrises and the sun sets.  The Sun is shining above the clouds… I just heard that recently and its so true.  Just because it seems grey during the day, that bright warm star is still there.  So as my daunting task of laundry presses on, as it will everyday that I wear clothes to be washed, I will too.  I will wash, I will fold, I will hang the clothes.  I will do it on days I don’t fell like doing it.  I will ask for help in doing it.  I will try not to be so damn miserable doing it.  I will FINISH one load at time, and continue on to the next!  Just hang in there laundry doers!

If I win the lottery I will hire someone full time to service my laundry.  End of story.