But You Did It Monday

What inconsistency can tell us when we stop using it against ourselves

You are welcome to show up at my house any time (unless you’re a vampire) and someone will be awake. But when you glance to the right, into the living room, please expect to see between two and seven laundry baskets heaped with clean clothes. They aren’t waiting to be folded, exactly. Mostly they’re waiting to be worn. Or waiting for the day my husband gets frustrated enough to fold it himself or task one of our adult children with tackling the pile and making it disappear.

Every night the kids dig through the baskets for shirts, shorts, and socks, careful not to topple the pile. It doesn’t bother me in the least, as much as my husband wishes it did. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’d love one of those Instagram family laundry basket systems that embraces this and makes it organized and functional, but the house isn’t in agreement there. So we live in perpetual failure of an aspirational traditional laundry system. Clothes meant to be hung on hangers and folded in drawers.

After twenty years of self-flagellation over my perceived failure as a wife and mother (laundry is obviously a core quality of those roles), I have accepted that I am just not a laundry person. It’s one of my limitations as a person. And when I weigh its merits on the priority list of traits to work on, laundry never makes the cut. I DO get the laundry washed. No problem. It’s clean, probably dry after a couple rounds in the dryer, and then into a basket. But that’s where the process ends for me.

UNLESS.

There is one exception to my complete inability to finish the laundry. A shortcut. A little band-aid. A body double. That sounds creepy, right? Body doubling is an ADHD strategy where another human sits with you while you work on a task. My laundry body double isn’t your typical body double, though. Family members won’t do, and neither will incidental visitors. It has to be a friend who is there expressly to sit with me while I fold and put away the laundry. I don’t need their help, not physically. Their presence is enough. Then and only then can I accomplish this most mind-numbingly futile task. But laundry body doubles are unfortunately in short supply on your random Tuesday.

Photo by Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare on Unsplash

But why? What’s the difference? Why is there absolutely no way for me to get laundry done under any other circumstances, but let a friend sit on my couch and it’s as good as done?

More importantly, why did I never think to ask that question before? You would think the exception would have made me wonder what was different. Instead, I treated it as proof that there was no real reason I couldn’t do it the rest of the time.

If only that were the only weird contradiction I was carrying around.

A few years ago, I took a job as a professional housecleaner. A move that probably baffled most of the people who regularly visit my home. What my house does not demonstrate is how much I enjoy cleaning. The movement, the gratification, the reward of a job well done over and over. A clear start and a clear finish.

That is NOT what it feels like to clean my own house. Well, it does when I get down to the deep-clean level, I guess. But on top of the fun cleaning are layers of decisions waiting to be made, emotional minefields, attention booby traps, and distractions. This makes perfect sense to me.

There is also a big difference between project-based hyperfocus cleaning and maintenance cleaning. Ew.

The hyperfocus kind I’m very good at. I wrote a book in under six months. Just plowed through it. Day or night, it didn’t matter, I could not be stopped. Other things slipped and other people stepped in to pick up the slack while I poured my heart out into my laptop, and I let them.

Before that I taught myself magazine writing, and then freelancing. The editors at the parenting magazine I ended up working for told me I was their most professional freelancer, then asked about my educational background. They were shocked to find out I was self taught.

So I’m not a person who can’t finish things. I’m also a person who cannot put away a basket of towels. For most of my life I couldn’t figure out how both of those existed in the same body.

I did have a theory. If I could do the big thing, I could do the small thing. And if the small thing wasn’t getting done, that was a me problem. Character. A lack of it.

It took becoming a coach, and being deep in therapy for my scrupulosity, before I could even make room for another possibility: that maybe something was different on the days it worked. Up until then there was a clear right and wrong in all things. If I wasn’t doing the right thing, the only variable was me. You don’t go looking for conditions when you already know who to blame.

I know where I learned that. Conference stories. Mothers who worked tirelessly around the clock and never complained. No one in those homes ever had to wonder whether there would be underwear in the drawer. They took care of everyone else before themselves. Our homes were temples. They needed to be in order so the spirit could dwell there. Mothers set the mood of the home. Our actions affected everyone’s spiritual well-being. So, no pressure. Somewhere in there a basket of unfolded towels stopped just being a basket of unfolded towels.

Now look at the cleaning again. Other people’s houses are simple. There’s a checklist. I’m unattached. There are no big decisions, I just move everything. There’s nothing I look at and get frustrated because my husband didn’t fix it, or it’s a return I never took back, or my kids keep peeing on that wall, or it’s a stack of bills I’ve been putting off dealing with.

At my house I start cleaning my closet and end up sorting through old photos. Or keepsakes. Or the Christmas decor. Or my son comes in with an emotional meltdown and needs help, and I’m not cleaning anymore. Or there’s a broken appliance I can’t decide what to do with, so I just clean around it.

That’s not the same job.

Right now the dryer is full and there’s no basket for it to go in. There are a couple in my room, a few in the living room, probably some in the kids’ rooms.

That’s a condition. A stupidly small one. I could go find a basket right now. Dump one out, carry it to the laundry room, empty the dryer, and… well, let’s not get crazy.

But for most of my life I wouldn’t have counted a missing basket as information at all. The laundry wasn’t done, and nothing else mattered. Not being tired or overwhelmed. Not being able to do it with a friend beside me but not alone. Not being able to happily scrub someone else’s toilets for money while I walked around the clutter in my own house. Those were excuses. The task was the task, nobody ever said so out loud, but I understood it was mine. And if I didn’t do it, the problem was me.

Which is probably why it took me so long to notice how consistent my inconsistency was. I can work late into the night with ferocious focus, but mornings, not at all. I can throw myself into a giant project for months, and maintenance makes me want to slam my head into a wall. I can clean for hours if cleaning is all I’m doing. Put a few decisions and some unfinished business between me and the dirt, blink, and I’m wandering around holding a screwdriver and a permission slip. I can put away laundry with a friend on the couch. Without one, I will probably just buy another basket.

For years I saw all of that and cringed in hot-mess-mom shame. Now I mostly go, huh. Why that time? Why with that person? Why could I do it Monday and not Tuesday? Maybe I slept better. Maybe somebody was waiting on me, or there was a deadline, or I knew where to start. Maybe I screwed up. I don’t know.

Me failing at the task doesn’t necessarily mean that the expectation was wrong. But it doesn’t mean I need more discipline either. It just means something happened, and if it keeps happening, especially if it doesn’t happen every time, I should probably get curious about it.

I still don’t have a functional laundry system. The dryer is full, there’s nowhere to put what’s in it, and there are clean baskets sitting in my living room as I type this. Eventually someone will need the dryer badly enough to go hunting for a basket. Mostly I just wonder where all the fucking baskets went.

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Want to investigate one of your own Mondays and Tuesdays?

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The Monday/Tuesday Investigation helps you take one thing you can do sometimes but somehow not reliably and look at what actually changes before deciding what the inconsistency means about you.

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