That being said, laundry now is much easier for me than when I was a new wife and mother. All tasks are more complicated and stressful when you have no money or extra time. I remember the first time we got our own washer and dryer. It was liberating. Instead of schlepping our laundry to the laundromat (and spend a ridiculous amount of time waiting for it to get done) I could simply do a load whenever I wanted, regardless of if I had the right change or not. And I didn't have to wait until I got my next paycheck to do it.
The worst was washing cloth diapers, of course. Many people won't understand the horror I am referring to. Too bad, because even though it was a horror, it also didn't inundate the landfills with plastic. Inundating the landfill with plastic is a much worse horror. And it was a lot less expensive to use your own cloth diapers than to buy plastic ones. Diapers could be used as burping cloths, too. And they were so much softer for the wee bairns. Whoops! I've been obsessively watching Outlander, and that just slipped out.
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| Gardening jeans from a really muddy weeding frenzy |
I used cloth diapers for all my kids. I had two girls in diapers for awhile, that was a lot of work. I used to hang them on the line to dry, I love how things smell when the dry in the fresh air.
ReplyDeleteAnd now, not much laundry to do, it's easy. But I miss baby laundry.
Baby laundry was satisfying because it was so primal. It was love.
DeleteI do believe that is the story of every woman of a certain age. Actually, there was not a choice between cloth and plastic, land fill nappies. The latter did not exist. We simply changed the diaper, rinsed in the toilet if necessary, and dropped it into a diaper pail, until laundry day. I wonder how many husbands changed diapers? Mine did not.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it is possible to turn back the hands of time and urge young mothers to use cloth? Yes, it is extra work. Yes, it is gross. But it is the right thing to do. And if you own a washer and dryer, it is a fairly easy thing to do.
DeleteI always liked doing the laundry. In the days when we had an old wringer washer I would spend my Saturdays doing the week's laundry for a family of nine. One of the nine wore cloth diapers. The clothes were hung on a clothesline. When they were dry they were gathered. Some were sprinkled with water and rolled up to distribute the moisture. The rest were folded. Then on Monday the sprinkled clothes were ironed. I did that too. My mother was happy that I liked laundry because she hated it. Besides I got out of doing dishes those two days.
ReplyDeleteWow, great memory!
DeleteI find it a thankless job. Never ending, tedious and thankless. A necessary evil to be sure. Funny because other tiresome jobs I love. Making order out of disorder suits me. Ah well...we have washers and dryers that the women of 100 years ago would think were the best things ever, and would most certainly improve their lives.
ReplyDeleteYes, our great grandmothers would be surprised at the many changes in women's lives.
DeleteI used cloth diapers for my first two children, but did use the new (at that time) disposable ones when we traveled. I was lucky that my husband was in charge of the laundry at that time. He would tell me tales of the laundromat when he came home and how people moved far away from him when he took out the bag of a weekful of dirty diapers and put them in the washer. I used a diaper service for my second child. It was such a luxury. My other two children, who were born four and eight years later, mostly had disposable diapers. I wish I had known then what I know now about the damage this has done to our environment.
ReplyDeleteI must confess also used the (then) brand new convenience of disposable diapers when I traveled with my baby. Anyone would, given the opportunity and not knowing what we know now. Funny story about your husband's laundromat experience.
DeleteI actually like doing laundry, but I know I'm nearly alone in that. I've never experienced the diaper horror, obviously, but I know my parents used to use cloth diapers when I was a baby. By the time my brother came along they'd moved on to Pampers -- which are probably still in a landfill somewhere even as we speak.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm thinking of all the DNA that must still live in garbage dumps everywhere.
DeleteThat gruesome time of nappy buckets! A lot has changed. Thankfully. It was tough in rainy Ireland in an old house with open fireplaces/wood stoves and no dryer. Just picture the maze of drying horses - as we called them.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter uses a mix of compostable once-off nappies, a local cloth nappy wash and delivery service (they use an electric bicycle!) and the odd pampers kind in emergencies. If only we had the ideas then, we would be rich now.
I enjoy laundry when it's warm enough to dry outside, the smell of sun-dried laundry is one of my favouriter smells. I am fussy about the way I hang it and I resent it when R gets involved (occasionally I try and relax but I own this neurosis).
We still don't have a dryer.
Best to always own one's neurosis! I think diaper wash and delivery services might be the best future for working mothers.
DeleteMy daughter recently sent me this little ditty that made me laugh:
ReplyDeleteBut I would wash 500 piles
And I would wash 500 more
Just to be the mom
Who washed 1000 piles
To find more on your floor
Awww
DeleteQuick memory flash: Kramer has fallen out with a laundromat owner and enlists an increasingly reluctant Seinfeld to help him wreak vengeance. Kramer's scheme is to fill one of the machines with cement while Seinfeld's job is to ward off unwanted attention. Rumbles and bangings occur off-camera while S's expression evolves from nervousness, to panic, to total moral collapse. Saying piteously: "Kramer, couldn't you just buy another shirt?" A masterly display of avoiding the obvious scene (K at the washing machine) and instead communicating its horrors via S's face.
ReplyDeleteLaundry antipathy is a sign of growing maturity. By now you should also have passed one of the other important staging posts that are proof of growing up: a determination to avoid - for evermore - cleaning the inside of the oven. Even though the oven now belches black particulates whenever you decide to inspect the progress of doing some long-term thermal damage to a lambshank.
VR agrees completely about diaper funk (nappie funk in the UK). She reminds me that we had a gift from her mother - a Belling boiler - using in the first stage of getting rid of the clayey white crud. Belling always seemed a wrong sort of name for a manufacturer of kitchen appliances. Too musical, perhaps.
Nothing to agonise about. You're a mother and thus entitled to look for a shotgun when some hapless male says, "My wife doesn't work. Stays at home, in fact".
You always cheer me up! I have never cleaned our oven. Never. It has always been my sweet husband's job. Another reason why I can't live without him.
DeleteAnd I'm pretty sure he started cleaning the oven when it became clear that I was never going to do it.
DeleteAh, you remind me of my childhood when there were four kids and my parents and a whole lot of laundry all the time. My mom did the washing and drying, but the clothes came out of the dryer and put in a heap in a very large box. We would hunt out our favorite clothes to wear from there. Now it's just Roger and me, and we do laundry once a week. One simple load. If we had better weather, I'd dry it all outside.
ReplyDeleteMy poor mother had 7 children. I wonder how many loads of laundry she did over the course of her long life?
DeleteI did most of the cloth diaper laundry when my brothers were babies (I was 15). It was a lot of work and not very pleasant. But my babies were in daycare part-time, so I was required to use disposables.
ReplyDeleteLife is often more complex than I imagine it to be.
DeleteI used cloth with my older kids and dispoasables with the younger. I preferred cloth for all the reasons given here, not least of which concerns the expense of disposables and the havoc they wreck on the environment. I also remember the clothes horses Sabine mentions, set all around the family room at night like a convention of damp and steamy ghosts!
ReplyDeleteNow you are giving me a image of diapers that is both ethereal and haunting. Leave it to the Irish to create beauty from something so mundane!
DeleteNo, the damp and steamy ghosts on the clothes horse were not diapers (at least not the time I remember) but my dad's shirts, bed linens, towels and underwear brought in from the clothes line outside where if left too long they'd have become wetter than when they were put out!
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