I am chatting with a friend of mine who has recently become a parent at an older age–after nearly twenty years of adult life without children. I ask her what she has found to be the biggest change and adjustment to family living as opposed to “couple living.” I think she will talk about the sleep or the time crunch. Instead she says without hesitating, “Laundry and dishes!”
I think I’ve grown nearly numb to the constant need to manage laundry and dishes in a bustling household. But, she might might be right. I do at least one load of laundry a day (more on days when it’s time to do towels and sheets and such) and the dishwasher also gets turned on at least once a day–often twice–once in the morning and once at night. And then there’s the human work–the gathering, sorting, folding, rinsing, stacking and putting away. It’s been so long for me that I can’t even remember life BEFORE, when there wasn’t a house full of clothes and china to manage!
My eldest daughter was talking to me the other night about all the things she just “had to have” when she moves out on her own in another year. She insisted that she couldn’t live in a house without a dishwasher. I gently pointed out to her that if she was just living by herself, she’d probably only have three dishes at any one time–how easy would it be to just wash them up? She and I both got a little dazed, glazed look on our faces as we imagined what that must be like–a few dishes, just a few, dirty at any one time–quickly washed up and ready for the next use. What must it be like to walk into a kitchen that you cleaned before you left and have it still be clean?!
I used to have a single, non-parent, forty-something-year-old friend and she cleaned her house quickly on Sunday morning and did her two loads of laundry on one weekend day, too–ready for an entire week. Oh, my–the thought of it sent me into a panic–I couldn’t imagine going five or six days without doing laundry, I imagined the huge, reeking mountain of grimy clothes piling up and piling up until there would be no where to walk the halls of my entire upstairs.
I guess it’s all in one’s perspective and definitely connected to the amount on non-adult bodies who’ve taken up residence in the house!