Airing My Dirty Laundry

When my younger sister (let's call her Laura Ingalls, her favorite character of books and TV) and I were growing up, our mother had a full-time job. We were latch-key kids and, instead of coming home to freshly baked sugar cookies, we came home to a list of chores. I know, take out the violin. But chores were a part of our life and we accepted that. More accurately, my sister embraced the domestic duties and I accepted the fact that she was better at them. So I bribed her to do my share because, from my first paper route at 11, I always had an after-school job. Laura Ingalls was, and still is, a card-carrying member of the Neatnik Generation. An organizational guru. When we were young, she color coordinated the clothes in her closet and kept the contents on index cards so she wouldn't repeat her outfits. If you were reading a book and put it on the coffee table to nip off to the kitchen for a snack, the book would be filed away in the bookshelf (alphabetically by author) by the time you got back. She proposed cooking weekends so we could make the week's dinners and then freeze them. I'm pretty sure she even knew how to use a crockpot and had her own sewing kit for reinforcing those pesky loose buttons. But that's just a little freaky and I think she knows that now.

As it turns out, Laura Ingalls is currently a successful entrepreneur running her own, very well-organized business. And I am the housewife. So you never really know, do you? The point is that we knew that Comet was not only something in the solar system that is bigger than a meteoroid, but it was also an abrasive agent we used to scrub the sink and bathtub. The washing machine was not a mysterious white elephant that lurked in the basement. And we could cook up a mean tuna noodle casserole. So, not only were we domestic teenage divas turning out barely edible casseroles, we were frugal too!

Anyway, I digress. Enough with the trip down memory lane. On Friday morning, approximately 30 seconds before it was time to exit the front door and run hell-for-leather for the school bus, Truly asked, 'Mum, where is my PE uniform?'

I counted to ten and breathed in and out and refrained from yelling like a fishwife, 'Why do you always wait until the VERY LAST MINUTE?' Instead I asked very calmly (New Year's Resolutions still fresh in my mind), 'Did you check the pile of clean laundry I put on your bed?' (Four days ago).

'It's not there,' she said.

So we looked in all the obvious places--the hamper, the laundry room, the toy box in Scrumptious' room, behind the sofa cushions. No PE uniform.

Eventually, we found the PE uniform. Rolled up in a ball in a canvas bag UNDER TRULY'S UNMADE BED. I'll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say, when the bag was opened a troop of happy hormones marched out and performed an exuberant Irish clogging number all over the bedroom.

(Feel free to insert melody because an aroma this pungent deserves a lilting tune of its own):
Lift the wings,
That carry me away from here and,
Fill the sail,
That breaks the line to home.

Truly snatched the uniform and skulked off to greet the day. All I could do was stand back and thank the gods of crappy mothers everywhere that I wasn't one of her netball teammates.

So I wonder: Do stay at home mothers do too much for our children? Perhaps it's not only stay at home mothers, but 21st century mothers. Do we pamper them too much? Mommy-coddle them? Do they take us for granted? I'm not sure. But I'm going to teach Truly how to use the big white elephant in the basement. And maybe I'll enroll her in some Irish clogging lessons.